Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reveals in a BBC documentary that Russian President Vladimir Putin “threatened” him with a missile attack in an “extraordinary” and “very long” phone call, in the run-up to to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Johnson explains that in that conversation, Putin told him that “it would only take a minute” to carry out the attack, accusations that the Kremlin has been quick to describe as “lies.” The footage consists of three parts, the first episode of which airs today Monday night on BBC Two.
At the time of the call, the former premier says that Putin continued to assure that he had no intention of invading his Ukrainian neighbor, despite the massive influx of Russian soldiers in the border regions. In turn, the former British president warned him that the war would be a “total catastrophe”, of the harsh sanctions that Westerners would take and of the sending of more NATO troops to the borders with Russia if he embarked on this path.
The Kremlin denied the statements of the former British prime minister. “No, what Mr. Johnson said is not true, and more precisely, it is a lie,” said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, at his usual daily press conference.
The Kremlin representative pointed out that “if it was an intentional 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 what President Putin was saying to him.” “Then a feeling of discomfort arises with our president’s interlocutors,” he ironized.
Peskov claimed to be aware of the issues the two leaders discussed during the phone call. “I repeat it again officially: it is a lie. There was no threat of a missile attack,” he said.
According to the Kremlin spokesman, Putin told Johnson that if Ukraine joined the Atlantic Alliance, “the potential placement of US or NATO missiles along our borders would mean that any missile could reach Moscow within a few minutes.” .
Regarding the Atlantic Alliance, in the documentary Johnson affirms that he tried to dissuade Russian military action on the Ukrainian people by telling them that this Eastern European country would not join NATO “in the foreseeable future”. “He threatened me at one point and said: ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute’ or something like that,” adds the former British prime minister, who left Downing Street in early September after a succession of scandals.
Boris Johnson believed that for a moment “Putin was just playing with my attempts to negotiate” due to his “very relaxed tone of voice and his indifference”, despite the threats.
In the documentary, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tells how he became enraged by the attitude of Westerners at the time.
