Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile attack during a phone call in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, an allegation denied by Moscow.
Johnson, speaking to the BBC for a documentary, said the Russian leader had asked him about the prospects of Ukraine joining NATO, to which he replied that it would not be “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. Cheerful,” Johnson said, recalling the “very long” and “most extraordinary” call in February 2022 that followed a visit by the then prime minister to Kyiv.
“But I think because of the very relaxed tone he was taking, the kind of nonchalant air he seemed to have, he was just playing with my attempts to get him to negotiate.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson said was not true, or “more precisely, a lie.”
Relations between Moscow and London sank to their lowest level in decades, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, following the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury in 2018.
Johnson, who resigned in September in the wake of a series of scandals, sought to position London as Kyiv’s main ally in the West. While in office, he visited Kyiv several times and called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy frequently.
Also visited again this month.
