Russian territorial aggression against Ukraine didn’t feature much in the Brexit referendum campaign. It made headlines briefly when Boris Johnson blamed Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea on the European Union.
According to the Vote Leave frontman, Vladimir Putin’s land grab was a consequence of Brussels making foreign policy “on the hoof” and having “pretensions to running a defence policy”.
The logic of that position was that Kyiv had no right to choose its own allies and that European democracies should never have supported Ukrainian aspirations to escape submission to Moscow. It is the appeasement fallacy: if only the west acquiesced to Putin’s conviction that Kyiv is a Russian city and that Ukraine is not a proper country, he would not want to suffocate his neighbour’s independence.
That notion is refuted by all the evidence of campaigns to coerce countries deemed by the Kremlin to be errant possessions since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When Nigel Farage repeated the EU-provocation theory of the Ukraine war during the 2024 general election campaign, one prominent defender of Ukrainian sovereignty described the Reform UK leader’s assertions as “ahistorical drivel” and “Kremlin propaganda”. That stalwart friend of Kyiv was one Boris Johnson.
There is nothing unusual about Johnson contradicting himself. His talent as a political communicator came from the ability to hold whichever view was expedient to him in the moment and, for the duration of that moment, appear to hold it sincerely. In a more generous reading, he rose to the occasion of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, understanding events in their proper geopolitical perspective (and with access to classified intelligence reports), which afforded a different reading of Putin’s motives.
In 2016, his focus had been wilfully myopic. The goal of maximising Eurosceptic votes meant reaching for any argument that presented Brussels in a negative light. If that involved narrating the cause of a conflict on the other side of the continent in warped terms that matched the Kremlin story, so be it.
Putin despised the EU for his reasons; the leave campaign despised it for theirs. Johnson was not minded to interrogate whether that alignment of enmities discredited his cause.
This is the context in which Andy Burnham’s recent assertion that Russia meddled in the referendum needs to be understood. The prime minister said it was inconceivable, given all the evidence of Kremlin interference in elections around the world, that the toolkit of subversion would not have been deployed in support of Brexit.
That is not a controversial claim to anyone with a glancing awareness of Russian foreign policy and the means by which it is pursued – the swarms of bot accounts flooding social media with falsehoods; dirty money channelled to extremists; industrial dissemination of conspiracy theories and stoking of intercommunal tensions to undermine social coherence, deplete trust in democracy and make it less functional.
No candidate who was knowingly complicit in that process will admit as much. But even those who were unaware that their cause was boosted by Kremlin troll farms have incentives to deny it. No one wants their heroic victory recast as useful idiocy in service of a hostile power.
Conservatives have called Burnham’s intervention “dangerous and divisive”, which could be interpreted as a denial that interference happened or just as a preference that it not be mentioned to protect delicate pro-Brexit sensibilities.
Farage’s feelings were certainly hurt. He called the prime minister a liar and described the whole thing as a “Russia hoax” – the formula Donald Trump applied to well-substantiated allegations that his 2016 presidential campaign got a helping hand from Moscow. The Reform leader can’t be too surprised by the idea of Kremlin influence in British politics. His party’s former leader in Wales is serving a jail term for taking bribes from Russian spies.
The backlash forced Downing Street to clarify that the prime minister didn’t mean to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the referendum result. That is the right position when there is no way of knowing what impact, if any, foreign meddling might have had. The views that interference happened and also that the leave campaign would have prevailed anyway are compatible.
Some remainers might seek comfort in the idea that Britain’s democracy was hijacked and diverted through clouds of Russian-induced false consciousness to the wrong destination. The banal truth is that the Eurosceptic side won enough arguments and voters made their choice freely.
Brexiters didn’t need any outside help to turn latent anti-immigration sentiment into active hostility to free movement across European borders.
The Russia dimension is more relevant when it comes to a geopolitical argument that the pro-European side failed to land. In June 2016 it was hard to make the peril of strategic isolation for Britain, self-exiled from the club of European democracies, no longer confident in the transatlantic relationship, seem vivid or imminent.
Trump’s first presidential election was five months away. The full extent of his scorn for the US’s allies and his admiration for authoritarians would not be clear for years. His propensity to behave like a private client of the Putin regime can still shock, even if it no longer surprises, as with the sanctions-busting deal he struck last week to import billions of dollars of Russian diesel.
The hope, entirely vain, is to depress pump prices and assuage voter frustration ahead of midterm elections in November.
On top of the cash infusion for the Kremlin’s war effort, Trump added a bonus of rhetorical venom for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling for regime change in Kyiv. He blames Ukrainian targeting of Russian refining capacity for rising global energy costs because his narcissistic ego resists the truth – that his war in Iran has been a disaster for the US and a boon for its enemies. The fact that Russia is an Iranian ally, providing Tehran with intelligence support to resist US military pressure, is no impediment to Trump’s commercial collaborations with the Kremlin.
The exact character and motive involved in that relationship may never be elucidated. But there is no need to seek out hidden levers of influence that may not even exist when publicly available data paints a full enough picture.
Trump and Putin are two greedy despots who recognise no boundary between national interest and self-enrichment. They see law not as a restraint on government but as an instrument to be wielded by powerful leaders against perceived enemies. Their approach to domestic politics is gangsterish, based on networks of patronage and tribute. Their view of foreign affairs is imperial, based on the belief that strong states have natural title to territory in their immediate vicinity, and that big countries can trade in the fate of smaller ones like casino chips.
It is as obvious to Trump that Moscow has a seigneurial right over Ukraine as it is that he should be allowed to decide who governs Venezuela and who sells its oil.
That ethos leads inevitably to competition for resources where rival spheres of influence meet and, if there is no international framework for resolving that competition, to war. This is the lesson, learned the hard way in the 20th century, that became the foundational idea of the European project – the principle of swapping nationalistic rivalry for mutually beneficial cooperation within a common framework of law. That is why Putin and Trump cannot understand the EU and why they hate it.
And that is why the error of Brexit is more pronounced today than it was when the question was put in a plebiscite, and why Burnham is right to draw attention to the fact that Russia had a preferred side. The prime minister is also right when he says that rejecting the possibility of restoring closer ties with the EU would be “a dereliction of duty”.
Many falsehoods were propagated in the referendum campaign, but none greater than the leavers’ boasts of patriotism, when their agenda was certain to make Britain poorer and weaker. A decade into the error, there is no patriotism in pretending that Brexit has worked or in crying betrayal when anyone suggests a reversal. Isolation from the rest of Europe is the result that Britain’s enemies wanted in 2016. Sticking to that path is the route they would choose for Britain again today if they had a vote.
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Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
