Was Farage Right?

On 21st June, Nigel Farage, interviewed by BBC’s chief imperialist stooge Nick Robinson, reiterated his view, which he first aired in the European Parliament in 2014, that Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine was the result of provocation on the part of the west.

Farage’s position, and his doubling down in the days following the interview, has caused unbridled opprobrium amongst the ruling class and its allies, including the majority of the political class, media talking heads and the remains of the FBPE mob. Essentially, all the right people were annoyed and we should rejoice in that fact. Twitter was ablaze with people of various backgrounds tweeting that Farage was some sort of Putin stooge, swiftly followed by people of similarly various backgrounds replying that, at least on this topic, Farage was correct. But was he correct?

Speaking in the European Parliament on 16th September 2014, Farage said the following:

”This EU empire, ever-seeking to expand, stated its territorial claim on the Ukraine some years ago. Just to make that worse, of course, some NATO members said that they too would like the Ukraine to join NATO. We [the EU] directly encouraged the uprising in the Ukraine that led to the toppling of the President, Yanukovich, and that led, of course, in turn to Vladimir Putin reacting and the moral of the story is if you poke the Russian bear with a stick, don’t be surprised when he reacts.

Today we are rushing through an association agreement, at undue speed, with the Ukraine and as we speak there are NATO soldiers engaged in military exercises in Ukraine. Have we taken leave of our senses? Do we actually want to have a war with Putin? Because if we do then we are certainly going about it in the right way. Perhaps we ought to recognise that the West now faces the biggest threat and crisis to our way of life that we have seen for over seventy years.”

To the trained trade unionist eye, the text above could quite easily have been said by anybody at any trade union annual general meeting or even TUC Congress itself just a few years ago – obviously before the trade union movement collectively drank the imperialist kool-aid and passed disgusting and shameful motions like Composite 21, carried at TUC Congress in October last year. If I were to write a speech for someone to address an AGM or Conference on the topic, the wording I would use would be eerily similar to Farage’s.

As is necessary in this rather bonkers world that we live in, I have to say, without equivocation, that I do not agree with Farage with regard to his politics. Farage was labelled a Putin apologist for repeating a position he has held for ten years, and I have no desire to be labelled a Farage apologist, though I am sure that I will be anyway. Despite claims from the dribbling Guardian-reading faux-left that he is a fascist, he is in fact a Thatcherite, and dozens of people like him packed the Tory benches in Westminster during the 1980s. While Farage isn’t an exact facsimile, he reminds me of people like Sir Rhodes Boyson, the Yorkshire accented, bushy sideburned Tory MP for Brent North who advocated for corporal punishment in schools, or Sir Teddy Taylor, the former Tory MP for Southend East, who often made television appearances on lunchtime current affairs programmes predominantly for his hot conservative takes, adorned as they were with his distinctive Glasgow accent.

Farage’s assertion that the West, including the United States and European Union, actively encouraged the Maidan (or Euromaidan) movement, is wholly correct – the President of Ukraine up until 2014, Victor Yanukovovich, had led Ukraine to a closer alignment with the Russian Federation, counter to manoeuvres both within and without the country to align it with the European Union, which made him an enemy of US-led imperialism. Yanukovich’s decision to sign a free trade deal with Russia at the expense of a similar deal with the EU further enraged the West – they set about backing and agitating pro-EU elements within the country and fomented far-right extremism in the shape of Banderism – Ukrainian Nazism formerly led by the man that gave it its name, Stepan Bandera. Bandera was an unabashed Nazi collaborator who organised programs against minority ethnic groups within Ukraine. He is still admired as a hero my many, particularly in the west of the country.

The internal conflict in Ukraine, with pro-Eu, Pro-west protests spilling over into ugly violence, continued into 2014, with Yanukovich signing into law stringent anti-protest laws with the intent to quell the unrest. But the unrest continued unabated and Yanukovich eventually fled to Russia. However, the unrest and violence did not end there. With a puppet regime installed and EU and US imperialism pulling the strings, a wave of anti-Russian sentiment and anti-Russian action followed, particularly in the east of the country, where there are millions of ethnic Russians. Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts, with a combined population of 3.6m people, most of whom speak Russian, slid into a bloody civil war, with other oblasts finding themselves the scene of violent and bloody violence, with the most notable atrocity being the torching of a hall in Odessa, an oblast in the south of Ukraine, where clashes between pro-EU and pro-Russian citizens resulted in the pro-Russian section holding up in a trade union hall. The building was set ablaze, with the resulting inferno killing 40 people who were inside.

Farage, bullishly responding to criticisms made against him by politicians, liberals and the stenographers of the ruling class, wrote in a column in the Sunday Telegraph on 23rd June, stating that:

“I am not and never have been an apologist or supporter of Putin. His invasion of Ukraine was immoral, outrageous and indefensible. As a champion of national sovereignty, I believe that Putin was entirely wrong to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Nobody can fairly accuse me of being an appeaser. I have never sought to justify Putin’s invasion in any way and I’m not now.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I saw it coming a decade ago, warned that it was coming and am one of the few political figures who has been consistently right and honest about Russia’s Ukraine war”.

Whatever his views of Vladimir Putin and the Special Military Operation, only the most rabid and reactionary of the pro-NATO, pro-EU and pro-US set could argue that Farage, on this occasion and on this topic, is incorrect. The west had been agitating for a destabilising conflict in Ukraine since Viktor Yanukovich took a turn from the west to the east, believing that it could not only overthrow an elected President who was of no further use to them, but could also destabilise its larger neighbour, Russia, undermine the Putin leadership and possibly fracture the entire country. It is an essential truth that political forces on both the left and the right align from time to time, particularly on the subject of wars, even if the reasons that each side has for opposing those wars are markedly different.

This is why so many progressives have found themselves, albeit reluctantly, agreeing with Farage: It is why public figures, from James Cleverly to Matthew Wright to Sir Liam Fox, have taken to Twitter to attack Farage, most certain in their belief that they would be carried on a crest of a wave of approval from their followers, yet instead were absolutely rinsed by people of all political persuasions, telling them that they believed that Farage was correct. At the same time, it is to the extreme detriment and disgrace of the so-called and largely self-identified progressive forces in this country, like the trade union movement, that their leaderships have been driven by both Trotskyite and pro-imperialist internal forces to fully and without question back the NATO proxy war in Ukraine, to support the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians which have been thrown into a meat grinder of the west’s creation and have chosen to ignore all the events that led up to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including the massacre in Odessa.

Love Farage or loathe him, on the matter of western provocation of Russia, he was right.