Nigel Farage stated in a recent BBC Panorama interview that the West – specifically the EU and NATO – provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. As with all monocausal explanations of history, it lacks substance and depth, and in this case it glosses over the post-independence history of Ukraine and its people – their wishes, motivations and actions – in a manner Farage himself would find repugnant if the topic were Britain and the British people.
I’ll come back to that point. However, it’s worth noting that Farage claims to have a unique insight into these matters. He stated in the Panorama interview that he, alone of all British politicians, predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine 10 years ago. However, I think the speech he’s referring to was one he gave to the European Parliament on Sep 16th 2014, some months after Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas. And in fact, he later said that Russia wouldn’t commit to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Nevertheless, he claims “my judgement has been way ahead of everyone else’s in understanding this”.
Farage’s assessment of Russian intentions isn’t ahead of the curve, because it appears to derive in large measure not from a careful analysis and understanding of history, but rather from his deep-seated hatred of all things EU. I share his view that the EU is an abomination, and I’m grateful for his part in the decades-long struggle to enable Britain to break free from that evil empire. However, when Farage decries the EU for encouraging the Maidan protests in Kyiv in 2014, what he fails to understand or accept is that Ukrainians were (and are) agents of their own destiny and have been engaged in a multi-generational struggle for independence from an evil empire headquartered not in Brussels but in Moscow, and that the EU was no more responsible for the Maidan than for the defeat of communism.
The choice for Ukrainians in 2013–14 was stark: accept a never-ending customs union with Russia – meaning political and economic domination by Russia for the foreseeable future – or stand up and protest against it. This customs union with Russia was to be foisted on them by the Russian-sponsored President Yanukovych, contrary to his own prior statements, and against the wishes of the Ukrainian people and their elected representatives in parliament. Sound familiar? In many ways, Yanukovych could be seen as the Ukrainian equivalent of Theresa May, although at least Theresa May didn’t, in her final days, start shooting her opponents, attempt to start a civil war and finally flee to Brussels on an EU ship.
The idea that the Maidan was really just the result of Ukrainians being played by outside forces (particularly the EU) is as ridiculous as the claims that Brexit wasn’t really the will of the British people, that ill-informed Britons were misled, and that there was something sinister going on behind the scenes. In fact, it was a profoundly patriotic movement, even if it does seem odd to many of us that Ukrainians actually wanted (and still want) to join the EU. But the Ukrainian perspective is vitally important, so let’s hear what the Maidan protester, academic and chronicler of the Maidan Revolution Mychailo Wynnyckyj says about this:
…Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity represented a profound rejection of the previously taken-for-granted assumption underpinning (ironically) the EU project, according to which “modernization” should of necessity be be accompanied by a decline in the importance of “nation” as a locus of solidarity.
…
Sadly, the most popular (and wrong) descriptions of the “Ukraine Crisis” – a label that relegates Ukrainians to the status of objects of great power politics – are Russo-centric. According to these accounts, the Maidan protesters were nothing more than puppets in a geopolitical game, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a (legitimate) reaction to a supposedly aggressive West. Such analyses are not only offensive to Ukrainians (i.e., deny their agency), they are largely inaccurate in their interpretations of facts […] the protagonists of the violence (and their more moderate supporters) were not acting on anyone’s orders: theirs was an (idealistic) leaderless agency aimed at achieving revolutionary change within their own country.
It’s pretty ironic that Farage, of all people, doesn’t seem to get this. In fact, Farage’s rhetoric – describing Maidan in 2014 as a “coup d’état” – fits very much the mould of a Jolyon Maugham or a Rory Stewart, blaming the Brexit vote on outside agitators.
On Farage’s point about NATO “expansionism”, I’m not going to repeat myself by going over why that argument is false (I’ve spilt a lot of ink on that already), but I will just point out that Farage is wrong to claim in the Panorama interview that this was the justification for war that Putin gave to his own people. In fact, Putin and his circle give many different justifications depending on the audience, but to his own people (and partly for the benefit of potentially co-operative Ukrainians) he wrote a lengthy and ahistorical document claiming that the Russian and Ukrainian people are united in some sort of Slavic brotherhood, while saying Ukraine isn’t really a country and also claiming that it’s run by genocidal Nazis who need to be eradicated. Of course, everyone in Russia and those countries neighbouring Russia understood that what he meant was that Ukrainians are khokhols to be despised and trodden underfoot by the Russian master-race, and their country carved up and turned into a cash till for the Russian elite.
Farage is able to grasp the concepts of freedom, self-determination and sovereignty when it comes to countries menaced by a European superstate – at least on this side of the English Channel. And I like Farage, and was planning to vote Reform, but when he started talking about this issue, my pen just failed to make contact with the postal ballot form.
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