Nigel Farage’s claim that NATO provoked Russia is naive and dangerous

On June 21st Nigel Farage acknowledged that the war in Ukraine was the fault of Vladimir Putin, but told the BBC that Russia’s president had been “provoked” by NATO and the European Union. The leader of Reform UK, the populist party snapping at the heels of the governing Conservatives in pre-election polling and threatening to push them into third place, was echoing Mr Putin’s own arguments. The Russian leader is focused mostly on NATO, which provides the hard security that makes the EU safe. He complains that the alliance’s expansion into central and eastern Europe after the cold war made Russia’s position intolerable. Some Western scholars concur.

Mr Farage and Mr Putin have the argument upside down. Countries join NATO not to antagonise Russia, but because they are threatened by it. To understand how the arguments have shifted, you need to look back to the unstable politics of Europe in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.