Nigel Farage has accused the European Union of having “blood on its hands” over the Ukraine.
Does that sound over the top?
Well it might if you’ve been taking your cue from much of the media this last month. Mostly it has been following the line that Putin is a warmongering bully whose incursion into the Crimea was entirely unprovoked.
But you really don’t need to be a massive Putin fan to acknowledge that Farage has a point. It was the EU that provoked this crisis in the Ukraine, not the Russians.
To appreciate how, you have to go back to documents like this, which outlines the strategy for absorbing Ukraine into the EU. First step is an Association Agreement like the one signed, behind closed doors, by its acting prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in Brussels last week. Full membership normally follows later.
Well, that was the EU’s plan and it has been working on it for some time. The Ukraine was to form the jewel in the crown of the EU’s Eastern Partnership programme, which would see Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus brought closer to the bosom of the EU.
This was what David Cameron was endorsing last year when, at the time of Croatia’s accession to the EU, he described his dream of seeing a European Union which stretched “from the Atlantic to the Urals.”
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