In the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile strike during a phone call. Moscow has refuted this claim.
In an interview with the BBC for a documentary, Johnson claimed that the Russian president had enquired about the likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO and that Johnson had informed him that it would not happen “for the foreseeable future.”
“He threatened me at one point, and he said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute’ or something like that. Jolly,” Johnson said, recalling the “very long” and “most extraordinary” call in February 2022 which followed a visit by the then-prime minister to Kyiv.
“But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters what Johnson had said was not true, or “more precisely, a lie”.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the 2018 poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury had brought relations between Moscow and London to their lowest point in decades.
Johnson, who quit in September following a slew of scandals, aimed to make London Kyiv’s primary Western ally. He made multiple trips to Kyiv while in office and spoke with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, frequently.
