Farage 'deeply malign actor' says former defence attache

Reform leader working against Britain’s security interests’ as Litvinenko’s widow disgusted’ by his comments about Putin

- TOM WATLING

Russian dissidents living in the UK have hit back at the “deeply offensive” words of admiration for Vladimir Putin spoken by Nigel Farage and another Reform UK candidate.

The criticism comes as a British former defence attache who was previously stationed in Moscow described Mr Farage and his party, now third in the polls, as “deeply malign actors ... working against the security interest of our country”.

When asked about the accusations, a Reform UK spokesperson burst into laughter before suggesting that Julian Malins, a Reform party candidate who recently bragged about meeting Mr Putin and said that he “seemed very good”, was merely a highly intelligent and “eccentric sort of character”.

Mr Malins later sought to clarify his comments, saying that Mr Putin is a “popular” president and therefore a “good Russian president”, but adding that he is not a good man “in the Christian sense”.

Three dissidents, as well as the newly knighted Sir Bill Browder – who was Russia’s biggest foreign investor before being exiled by Mr Putin – told The Independent that comments made by Mr Farage and Mr Malins were an affront not only to them but to the British passport holder Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and political activist who is serving a 25-year prison sentence in a Siberian solitary confinement cell for speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine.

After the death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian penal colony, Mr Kara-Murza’s family now fear he will be Mr Putin’s next target.

In a BBC interview on 21 June, Mr Farage defended comments he had made in 2014 about the Russian president, saying that he had “disliked Putin as a person but admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia”.