Chris

Farage isn’t explicitly pro-Russia, he’s just not a particularly insightful commentator. He isn’t any kind of expert on Russia so he defaults to the Great Powers mindset that still underpins a lot of commentary about its invasion of Ukraine from 2014 onwards.

His assumption that Putin is entitled to feel provoked by EU and/or NATO expansion is a worldview right out of the postwar Yalta conference that carved up Europe between Western and Eastern blocs. It implicitly supports the Russian claim to have an interest in, and influence over, the behaviour of smaller states on its borders which flies in the face of the principle that sovereign states, especially those with democratic governments, have the right to determine their own fate - a principle that has grown stronger and clearer with every day that has passed since the fall of the USSR and its so-called Warsaw Pact.

That is not how the modern world works, which is why Russia is presently being taught a costly lesson in realpolitik in southern and eastern Ukraine that will, in the next 12-18 months, result in its defeat, followed by a generation of isolation and grinding poverty. It may also have the secondary benefit of deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Farage has, however, read the situation poorly at both ends. On the one hand he’s giving credence to Putin’s actions (whilst claiming not to) by appealing to the great-power politics of the last century, he also misunderstood Putin and his willingness to invade Ukraine because he is ignorant of Russian history and particularly how that informs Putin’s sense of destiny.

The upshot of all of this is that, willingly or unwillingly, he has ended up at every turn amplifying Russia’s preferred talking points (we’re not going to invade, we were entitled to feel aggrieved, blame NATO). I don’t know whether Farage has jumped on the ‘Putin needs an off-ramp/Ukraine must be told it has to negotiate’ bandwagon but I won’t be surprised if he has.