The UK and its allies got tricked into backing a “corrupt mafia state” in Ukraine and getting into a war of attrition against a Moscow-Beijing partnership, Dominic Cummings has said in an interview.

The longtime Tory political strategist led the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit and was one of the key aides to then-PM Boris Johnson until resigning in November 2020.

“We should have never got into the whole stupid situation,” Cummings told the outlet I News in an interview published on Wednesday, commenting on London’s full-throated support for Kiev. He also described Ukraine as a “corrupt s**thole that doesn’t matter at all.”

“This is not a replay of 1940 with the Potemkin [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky as the Churchillian underdog,” he added. “This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence.”

Western sanctions have been “more of a disaster” for the EU than for Russia, driving up the cost of living while pushing Moscow and Beijing closer together, according to Cummings. All the West managed to do is get into a war of attrition with Russia, “who we pushed into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power.”

Read more

British sanctions failing to harm Russia – UK MP

Cummings also addressed the argument that Russian President Vladimir Putin needed to be “taught a lesson” about invading neighbors.

“The lesson we’ve taught Putin is that we’re a bunch of total f**king jokers,” he said. “I mean, Putin already knew that before the war. But this has emphasized it and broadcast it to the entire world, what a bunch of clowns we are,” he added.

Between the sanctions regime and the US trying to seize frozen Russian assets, the West is encouraging the emergence of alternative global financial systems, he explained.

That’s not teaching Putin any lesson, only that we’re idiots.

Cummings slammed Johnson – with whom he is no longer on speaking terms – for using the Ukraine conflict for “acting out his Churchillian fantasies,” as well as the Parliament, which “swallowed all of his total bulls**t on Ukraine and actually took it seriously.”

Johnson was the key figure in getting Kiev to reject a peace deal with Russia in April 2022, according to the top Ukrainian negotiator, as well as Ukrainian media.

The former PM denied his role in scuttling the talks, calling the account “total nonsense and Russian propaganda.” However, he confirmed that he told Zelensky the UK would back him “a thousand percent” and that any deal with Moscow would be bad.