Nigel Farage has urged Volodymyr Zelenskiy to seek a peace deal with Russia, “otherwise there will be no young men left in Ukraine”.
The Reform UK leader, who has been criticised for suggesting the west provoked Russian aggression against Ukraine, said it was time for the Ukrainian president to rethink his goal of reclaiming all territory lost to Vladimir Putin’s invasion, as such a mission was going to be “incredibly difficult”.
Farage made his latest remarks on the Ukraine war while speaking to journalists from the Times and the Daily Mail on a trip to the Channel to highlight the number of small boat crossings. It came after another Reform UK politician, Julian Malins, the candidate for Salisbury, was booed for telling local voters that Putin “seemed very good”.
Malins had been asked whether Reform UK would continue to support Ukraine, as Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson have done, with the latter maintaining a relationship with Zelenskiy even after being forced out of No 10.
“War is not about, as it were, punishing or in some way running over thousands of young men in tanks and blowing them up because one person takes points of view which you disagree with,” Malins told a hustings in Salisbury on Sunday. “I have actually met Putin and had a 10-minute chat with him and he seemed very good. He is not the Austrian gentleman with a moustache come alive again.”
The constituency Malin hopes to represent is where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned with novichok. Skripal and his daughter survived the attack but at the end of June 2018 a Wiltshire woman, Dawn Sturgess, and her partner, Charlie Rowley, were poisoned in Amesbury, eight miles north of Salisbury. Sturgess, 44, died on 8 July that year.
While Farage has stressed he dislikes Putin and opposes the invasion of Ukraine, he has been criticised for expressing a narrative seen as supportive of the Russian president. He has also criticised Johnson for rejecting the prospect of a peace deal.
Speaking at a rally in Devon on Tuesday, Farage said: “Somehow, I am made out to be a Putin apologist, which of course I’m not. What he’s done in Ukraine is reprehensible.
“His Majesty’s Daily Mail, who have decided that I am one of the worst people that’s ever been born, not for the first time, just because I got up over 10 years ago and said that I felt the eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union would be used by a dangerous dictator as a reason to go to war.
“In Ukraine, I said, don’t poke the Russian bear with a stick because if you do you will get a very predictable result.”
