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Nigel Farage has been accused of “parroting Kremlin lines” after saying that he would vote against any UK government plans to deploy the military in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Britain and France said they would be ready to send troops to Ukraine after a peace deal, but the Reform UK leader said he would vote against any such move to put boots on the ground.
Farage’s comments cast doubt on his commitment to the UK’s national security, the cabinet minister Pat McFadden said. He accused the politician of taking a pro-Russia stance on the issue, which he said should give voters “pause for thought”.
“This guarantee is not just for Ukraine, it’s for the whole of Europe,” he said. “It’s in the British national interest that we do that, and that’s why it’s so concerning to me to see some politicians, like Mr Farage, for example, immediately come out [and] parrot the Kremlin line and say that he wouldn’t support this.”
Farage faced criticism for “not really [being] an MP at all” on Wednesday after choosing to appear on Times Radio instead of attending prime minister’s questions in the Commons. During the broadcast he criticised Starmer’s Ukraine policy and said he would vote against any proposal to deploy troops to the country.
“It would be a very interesting vote. I would vote against,” said Farage, who is one of five Reform MPs. “We neither have the manpower nor the equipment to go into an operation that clearly has no ending timeline.”
He added: “If the coalition of the willing was eight, 10, a dozen countries and we could rotate battalions through then I might well say, ‘Yeah, absolutely let’s do it’. As it is, it will be us and the French completely exposed for an unlimited period of time.”
Farage’s comments came after a summit on Tuesday of more than two dozen leaders of the states that make up the “coalition of the willing” of Ukrainian allies, plus the US envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron signed a declaration of intent with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Paris, and said they were committed to deploying ground troops to Ukraine. At prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Starmer said MPs would have a debate and vote before any UK troops were deployed on peacekeeping duties.
Farage’s stance on Russia has become a key Labour attack line against Reform, in particular since the jailing of the party’s former leader in Wales Nathan Gill in last November for taking bribes to make statements in favour of Russia when he was an MEP.
In the past, Farage has spoken of his admiration for Putin as a political operator and repeatedly warned the west against “poking the Russian bear with a stick”, accusing the EU of provoking the war in Ukraine in 2024. After criticism, he wrote in the Telegraph that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “immoral, outrageous and indefensible” but added: “[I]f you have neither the means nor the political will to face him down, poking a bear is obviously not good foreign policy.”
A Labour spokesperson said Farage’s comments were the “behaviour of Putin’s puppet”. They said: “Nigel Farage’s equivocation on support for Ukraine is an insult to those who have fought to defend freedom.
“When Farage shrugs at support for Ukraine, a country that has been brutally invaded, people are entitled to ask who he is really speaking for, because this is not patriotism, it’s the behaviour of Putin’s puppet.”
