The former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, revealed in a special interview to the BBC network that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile attack ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Johnson described that in that “extraordinary” phone call, Putin threatened “it will only take a minute.”
According to Johnson, the threat was made to him after he warned Putin that the war in Ukraine would be an “absolute catastrophe”, during a “very long” conversation in February 2022.
Johnson is considered one of the biggest supporters of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He tried to convince Putin that there was no chance that Ukraine would soon join NATO and warned the Russian president that any invasion of the country would mean “more NATO, not less NATO” within Russia’s borders.
“He threatened me at one point, saying, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but, with a missile, it will only take a minute’ or something like that,” Johnson said. “But I think the very calm tone he took, the kind of detachment he seemed to have — he just ‘played’ with my attempts to get him to negotiate. You never know if Putin’s threat was real,” Johnson described.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to the published interview and claimed that Johnson’s words regarding the missile threat to Britain were incorrect, “more precisely, a lie,” Peskov said.