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By William James
LONDON (Reuters) - Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's right-wing Reform UK party, said the eastward of expansion of the European Union and NATO had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
The remarks, made in an interview with the BBC aired late on Friday, drew strong criticism across the British political spectrum ahead of a July 4 election in which Farage's party is predicted to win millions of votes.
Farage said he stood by comments made shortly after Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when he posted on social media that the move was a "consequence of EU and NATO expansion". He said he had been predicting a war in Ukraine as early as 2014.
"It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, 'They're coming for us again' and to go to war," Farage said in Friday's BBC interview.
"We provoked this war ... of course it's his (Putin's) fault - he's used what we've done as an excuse."
Russia casts its special military operation in Ukraine as part of a broader struggle with the West, which it says wants to bring Russia to its knees. Kyiv and the West reject this and accuse Russia of waging an illegal war of conquest.
Farage's decades of campaigning against Britain's membership of the EU and mass immigration has made him one of the country's most recognisable and divisive politicians.
His surprise entry into the election race has further hit Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's hopes of closing the centre-left Labour Party's opinion poll lead.
Even though Reform is unlikely to win many seats in parliament, it could split the right-of-centre vote across the country. The party held only one seat in the last parliament, which it gained when a Conservative lawmaker defected.
Farage's remarks on Ukraine drew immediate condemnation.
Sunak said Farage was "completely wrong", accusing him of appeasement that put Britain and its allies' security at risk. Labour's defence spokesman John Healey called Farage's comments disgraceful and labelled him a "Putin apologist".
Farage later posted on X: "Putin was wrong to invade a sovereign nation, and the EU was wrong to expand eastward. The sooner we realise this, the closer we will be to ending the war and delivering peace."
(Reporting by William James; Editing by Helen Popper)
