Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform U.K. party, is facing wide-ranging criticism over his claim that the West provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine
Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform U.K party, is facing wide-ranging criticism across the political spectrum over his claim that the West provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, including of being an appeaser.
In a BBC television interview broadcast Friday evening, Farage, who is seeking to woo voters away from Britain’s governing Conservatives at the July 4 general election, drew a link between the expansion of NATO and the European Union eastwards over the past few decades and the invasion.
Claiming that he warned of a potential war in Ukraine in 2014, when he was a member of the European Parliament, Farage said “we provoked this war.” It’s unclear whether his warning came before or after Russia had annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in February 2014.
“It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, ‘They’re coming for us again’ and to go to war», Farage said.
