Nigel Farage has accused Nick Clegg of being part of a group that is "screaming out" for war, as he hit back at "ridiculous" claims he was a supporter of Vladimir Putin.
Clegg and Farage have continued to snipe at each other in the wake of their bruising encounter at the first televised European Union debate on Wednesday.
Yesterday the deputy prime minister seized on Farage's suggestion that the EU was to blame for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "It shows quite how extreme people can be like Nigel Farage when their loathing of the European Union becomes so all-consuming that they even end up siding with Vladimir Putin in order to make their point," Clegg said.
But speaking to LBC radio on Friday morning, Farage was having none of it.
"I’ll tell you what’s extreme, I’ll tell you what hatred is and that’s the Liberal Democrats being in a group in the European Parliament, constantly screaming out for us to go to war," he said.
The Ukip leader said the Lib Dems and their allies in the European parliament were wrong to have supported Western military intervention against the Libyan and Syrian regimes.
Farage added: "What we see in the Ukraine, is the result of an absolutely stupid, almost imperialist EU foreign policy that says, like all empires, it wants to expand, and expand, and expand. I do not want to be part of a European Union that has an activist, militarist and expansionist foreign policy."
And he said it was a "ridiculous, cheap, political remark" for Clegg to claim that he was a supporter of Putin. Farage said it had been a mistake for the EU to "poke the Russian bear with a stick" over Ukraine.