Former British Ambassador to Russia Anthony Brenton, who served in the country in 2004-2008, has agreed with leader of Britain’s right-wing populist party Reform UK Nigel Farage’s statement that it was the West that provoked the conflict in Ukraine.

In an op-ed for The Daily Telegraph, Brenton called on the West to start peace talks with Russia.

"Nigel Farage has faced almost unanimous criticism for his assertion that, while Vladimir Putin carries prime responsibility for the war in Ukraine, the West’s provocative decision to enlarge NATO had made Russia ready for confrontation. But these criticisms are mostly outbursts of the ‘How can you parrot Putin?’ variety rather than serious examinations of the evidence," Brenton pointed out.

According to him, "when NATO enlargement first loomed, both [former Director of the US Department of State Policy Planning Staff] George Kennan and [former US Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger warned of the likely disastrous effects for Russia-West relations." The US embassy in Moscow reported that Russians saw Ukraine’s NATO accession as the "brightest of red lines," Brenton added.

"I was there as British ambassador and was told by one well placed contact that it would ‘destroy the trust of the entire Russian security sector.’ The demand that Ukraine should not join Nato has since been front and center in all Russian contacts with the West. <...> So the Western belief in the irrelevance of NATO enlargement is wrong. Could we be wrong on other things? You bet," the former British ambassador went on to say.

As the conflict in Ukraine drags on, the West needs to begin negotiating ways to end it, he noted. Brenton believes that a peace agreement could include Ukraine dropping plans to join NATO, with the West providing the country with security guarantees.

"So Ukraine and its Western backers effectively face a choice: either reap these rewards [Ukraine’s survival as a state and its closer ties with Western countries] by finding a territorial settlement (the hardest part of which will be doing a deal on Crimea) or continue a long and unpredictable war where, at the moment, the momentum seems to be with Russia and, in the course of which, we have seen a slow but ineluctable slide towards direct Russia-NATO confrontation with all of the appalling escalatory consequences that could carry. Time, surely, to talk," Brenton concluded.

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