Published by The i Paper (20th October, 2025)
Nigel Farage wants you to know he is prepared to be tough towards Vladimir Putin. He has told an interviewer he would order the shooting down of Moscow’s jets if they dared enter Nato airspace, adding that the Russian president is “a very bad dude” whose behaviour is “terrible” and saying he supports use of frozen Kremlin assets to aid Ukraine’s defence. The Reform UK leader hopes that his words will put what he calls “the Russia hoax stuff” finally to bed, showing he can be trusted to defend Britain’s national interests at a time when he is ahead in opinion polls and on course to become our country’s next prime minister.
The reason for this sudden bid to appear Churchillian is simple. Farage has a long and contemptible record of being so blinded by loathing of the European Union that he ended up frequently echoing Putin’s propaganda about the West being to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He has accused “expansionist” Brussels of having “blood on its hands” over the war. He infamously praised Putin – “as an operator, but not as human being” – when asked to name the world leader he most admired. And he accepted four-figure payments to appear on the dictator’s slavish broadcaster; indeed, he was even given a mock knighthood on one Russia Today show by a child dressed as The Queen.
Suddenly, however, Farage is frightened his desire to reach Downing Street might be thwarted by this simpering stance towards a bloodstained war criminal waging war on the West. As I wrote here last month in a column about Russia’s use of cash, conspiracy theories and extremists to sow division, his position was thrown into sharp relief after a close colleague was exposed as a traitor. Nathan Gill was a Welsh Ukip MEP for six years, then followed Farage into the Brexit Party before running Reform’s campaign for the Welsh Senedd. Yet, while posing as a devout patriot, this duplicitous creep betrayed Britain by taking bribes to deliver pro-Kremlin statements in Europe’s parliament and the media.
Clearly this is causing concern for Farage, who once declared that his Welsh party leader was “honest and loyal”. Bizarrely, the Reform leader told the BBC he was the only senior figure in his latest party who had met Gill. This was absurd since there is plenty of evidence showing this to be false. Both Reform’s chairman David Bull and deputy leader Richard Tice are former Brexit Party MEPs, so knew their ex-colleague. Tice has posted images of the pair out on the campaign trail while Bull reportedly joined him on a controversial European parliamentary trip to Kashmir.
Farage was tetchy when pressed by Mishal Husain on Bloomberg over how he would react to Russian military incursions if prime minister. “Listen love, you’re trying ever so hard,” he responded patronisingly to this prominent female journalist, before saying he was prepared to order shooting down Russian jets. “I’m the only person in the world, I think, that stood up in the European Parliament in 2014 and do you know what I said: there will be a war in Ukraine – it’s coming. I’m the only person that got it right,” he added.
This is a bold claim – if strange given all the ignored warnings from voices in Baltic and Eastern European nations with such a painful history of Russian subjugation. So I checked if Farage really was this lonely voice blowing the whistle on the risks of conflict with Russia at that time. And guess what? It seems this is another piece of fantastical evidence to show how he mimics his idol Donald Trump in displaying a shameful disregard for truth in his lunge for power – even as the populist pair’s fans praise their supposed authenticity and straight-talking.
According to the European Parliament database, Farage spoke once on Ukraine or Russia in 2014. It was in September – so seven months after Russia had launched its invasion by grabbing Crimea and attacking Donbas. This speech was sordid in how closely it followed the Kremlin script by blaming the EU and Nato for “unnecessary provocation” and accusing them of fostering a “coup d’etat” that ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych “leading to this instability”. Farage even claimed Putin was really “on our side” in the fight against Islamic terrorism. “Do we actually want to have a war with Putin?” he asked. “Because if we do, we are certainly going about it the right way.”
In reality, Yanukovych fled to Russia after the slaughter of more than 100 protesters in Kyiv, then was stripped of office by a constitutional majority vote in parliament. Even the Kremlin recognised the new Ukrainian government.
Yet according to Farage, the moral of those events in Ukraine – which I witnessed with the first annexation of European land since the Second World War – was that “if you poke the Russian bear with a stick, do not be surprised when he reacts”. So instead of blaming Putin for attacking people seeking the freedom and democracy that he claimed to espouse, this chancer ended that speech by telling his fellow European parliamentarians: “You are the guilty people and you refuse to accept it.”
Farage took this position repeatedly – even declaring in one debate that it was not a “simple black and white issue” and sharing Putin’s conspiracy theory about rebels in Syria being possibly responsible for the regime’s horrific poison gas attack.
Despite this desperate pivot last week, the Reform leader still claims the EU and Nato share blame for sparking Russia’s atrocities and war crimes in Ukraine. Yet unlike almost all conflicts, this really is a simple issue and Kyiv’s brave fight for freedom is one of striking moral clarity.
Far from deserving plaudits as the only person who “got it right” over Ukraine, Farage exposes only shifty duplicity – along with his disturbing espousal of Russian propaganda and his total unfitness to lead our country in such turbulent times when democracy is under global assault from dictatorship.