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........

© The Guardian