Johnson, speaking to the BBC for a documentary to be broadcast later on Monday, said the Russian leader had asked him about the prospects of Ukraine joining NATO, to which he had responded it would not be “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,” 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.”
Russia denies Johnson’s account.
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The Kremlin said on Monday that former British prime minister Boris Johnson was lying when he said President Vladimir Putin had threatened him with a missile strike during a phone call in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine.
ReplyDeletePutin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that what Johnson said was not true, or “more precisely, a lie.”