Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has accused a prominent legacy media outlet of printing falsehoods and “collaborating” with the Kremlin to smear him to protect the “dying Conservative Party”.
The Mail on Sunday, the sister paper of the Daily Mail, may be facing a lawsuit from Nigel Farage over its headline over the weekend which read: “Zelensky: Farage Is Infected with ‘Virus of Putin’,” after the Brexit leader stated the West played a role in provoking the Russian invasion with EU and NATO expansionism.
Mr Farage said that the headline was “totally untrue” and said he instructed the Carter-Ruck law firm to “deal with it”.
The alleged quote from Zelensky appears to have originated from BBC journalist Gordon Correrra, who said on X that a source within the government in Kyiv allegedly said in response to Mr Farage’s comments: “The virus of Putinism, unfortunately, infects people.”
Mr Farage noted that the quote was not attributed to Zelensky and did not mention his name personally as the MoS headline appeared to imply. The BBC also reported that the Zelensky government refused to put out an official statement on the controversy.
Meanwhile, the Brexit leader also criticised the Daily Mail for directly approaching the Kremlin to ask whether it considered him an “ally”.
The “Daily Mail are so desperate to smear Reform that they have now contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry and goaded them into a supposed quote from someone in Sergey Lavrov’s office calling me an ‘ally’,” Mr Farage said.
“That a UK newspaper group is actively collaborating with the Kremlin to protect their dying Conservative party is an absolute scandal. The British people will see through this act of utter desperation.”
The row with the legacy media outlet comes as the Westminster uniparty closed ranks to attack Farage over his comments on the Ukraine war, with both Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and ‘opposition’ Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer criticising the Reform leader as his party surges in the polls ahead of the July 4th general election.
Defending his position that the West played a role in “provoking” Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Mr Farage wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: “Don’t blame me for telling the truth about Putin’s war in Ukraine. Facing up the facts about the mistakes of the past has to be the first step towards the peaceful future we all want to see.”
The Brexit leader maintained that he has never been “an apologist or supporter of Putin” and said that the invasion of Ukraine was “immoral, outrageous and indefensible.”
“As a champion of national sovereignty, I believe that Putin was entirely wrong to invade the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Nobody can fairly accuse me of being an appeaser. I have never sought to justify Putin’s invasion in any way and I’m not now.
“But that doesn’t change the fact that I saw it coming a decade ago, warned that it was coming and am one of the few political figures who has been consistently right and honest about Russia’s Ukraine war.”
This drew a stern rebuke from former Prime Minister Boris Johnson — one of the most vociferous supporters of Kyiv since the Russian invasion occurred under his watch.
Johnson called Mr Farage’s position as “nauseating ahistorical drivel and more Kremlin propaganda”.
“The people of Ukraine voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to be a sovereign and independent country. They were perfectly entitled to seek both NATO and EU membership. There is only one person responsible for Russian aggression against Ukraine – both in 2014 and 2022 – and that is Putin,” the former PM said.
Johnson said that “to try to spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies,” adding that “the problem in the last 30 years has not been Western provocation but Western weakness in the face of Russian aggression – a weakness exemplified by this article.”
Despite his tough rhetoric, the ex-prime minister — and current Daily Mail columnist — himself previously faced accusations of being a “Putin apologist” after he suggested that the 2014 invasion of Ukraine by Russia was a result of the EU’s expansionist policies in Ukraine, a strikingly similar argument to those he now chastises Farage for making.