Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has revealed that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile during a phone call ahead of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
According to the former British Conservative leader, Putin told him that he did not want to hurt him, but that the missile strike would “only take a minute.” The threat came after the former prime minister warned Putin that the war would be “a total catastrophe”, according to Johnson in a program to be broadcast on the BBC tonight.
Johnson’s account is part of a British Public Broadcaster documentary assessing Putin’s contacts with world leaders ahead of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The former UK prime minister also warned Putin in the lengthy phone conversation that Western sanctions over an invasion of Ukraine and the deployment of Atlantic Alliance forces along the borders with Russia would be imminent.
Johnson also tried to deter Russian military action by telling Putin that Ukraine would not join NATO. Johnson said, “He threatened me once and said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it’ll only take a minute’ or something like that.”
“But I think because of the very relaxed tone that he was taking on, the kind of nonchalant air that seemed to him, he was just playing along with my attempts to have a conversation,” Johnson said of the call. said “very familiar”. and “extraordinary”.
The BBC documentary titled “Putin versus the West” also states that on February 11, 2022, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace traveled to Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, and assured him that Ukraine There will be an attack. Not done.
The Kremlin refutes the statements of Boris Johnson
The Kremlin has denied the statements of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “No, what Mr. Johnson said is not true, more precisely, it is a lie,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at his usual daily press conference.
The Kremlin representative explained that “if it was a deliberate lie, the question arises for what purpose he chose this way of expressing himself, and if it was not intentional, it was because he did not understand That’s what President Putin was telling them.”
“Then a feeling of uneasiness arises with the interlocutors of our president,” he sarcastically. Peskov claimed to be aware of the issues discussed by the two leaders during the phone call. He insisted, “I repeat this again in an authoritative manner: This is a lie. There was no threat from the missile strike.”
According to a Kremlin spokesman, Putin told Johnson that if Ukraine joined the Atlantic Alliance, “the possible deployment of US or NATO missiles on our borders would mean that any missile could reach Moscow within minutes”. “
