Farage’s Ukraine comments were hardly offensive – other party leaders could use a history lesson | Simon Jenkins

Iis nigel farage guilty as charged? A peacemaker, a disgrace, an apologist for Putin, an insult to Ukraine, says a chorus of British party leaders during the election campaign. They are apparently content to vilify the growing Reform Party, an attack that does not involve spending public money.

What Farage said was this NATO and the EU took some responsibility for Putin’s attack on Ukraine, through his 20-year “provocation” of Moscow – expanding NATO membership to encircle Russia’s national border. It had broken the old rule: “Don’t poke the Russian bear, it tends to react.”

Why Farage revived this maxim may have something to do with his own delay in the election sceneand his need for a big title. In fact, he simply joined the school of “neo-realists” who emerged in response to a series of inept Western interventions in conflicts across the Asian continent. Politicians such as the American Donald Trump and various European populists are preaching a new isolationism. One conflict they would like the west to disengage from is Ukraine. This is a conflict that has become a classic stalemate.

Farage’s line is familiar to anyone who took part in the seminar celebration that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The newly liberated Russians said in unison, you’ve won, but don’t push Moscow too far. Kremlin expert George Kennan warned the West not to enjoy his victory. This will hand Russia over to the chauvinistic – and militant – right. Moscow’s leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, pleaded with NATO not to expand its membership to countries bordering Russia. Let them be neutral like Finland was. The records show that this non-extension was agreed upon and verbally promised from the USA, etc.

Within a decade, NATO was negotiating with potential new members in the Baltic states and the Black Sea. With his coming to power in 2000, Putin realized this and requested NATO membership myself. It didn’t lead to anything. But Western statesmen like Henry Kissinger continued to preach vs inflaming Russian nationalismnot least over Ukraine, the homeland of medieval Russia.

But in the end, the west is behaving carefully. It did nothing to provoke Russia over its brutality in Chechnya or its invasion and annexation of Georgian territory in 2008. It remained an observer in 2014 at Russia’s reoccupation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine’s Donbass. He certainly hadn’t given it much thought acceptance of Ukraine to NATO, which would undoubtedly be provocative. If there was any historical validity to Farage’s charge of provocation, it has surely been spent.

The failure of the West to help create a new European Russia in the 1990s may rank as one of the great miscalculations of the post-war era. But a more immediate miscalculation must be Putin’s attempt to oust President Zelensky with a swift strike to Kiev. The West’s urgent task must be to get Putin off the hook he has put himself on, to stop the bombing and killing. Those now discussing a settlement seem to agree that it will involve a partial separation of Ukraine along the ceasefire line and some redefinition of its eastern regions.

This cannot be helped by Britain’s vote-seeking politicians insisting on ‘total victory’. news hunting trips to Kyiv. It doesn’t help either to heap insults on everyone who, like Farage in his other remarks, is clearly stands for peace.

• Simon Jenkins is a columnist for the Guardian

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