Putin threatened to drop missile on Boris

LONDON: Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Boris Johnson he could easily kill him with a missile, during an “extraordinary” phone call before Russia invaded Ukraine, the former British prime minister has revealed.

Mr Johnson said Mr Putin had made the threatening comment during a long call in February last year, as Russian troops massed near Ukraine’s border.

“He sort of 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,” Mr Johnson said.

The conversation came shortly after Mr Johnson had travelled to Kyiv to offer support to Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky.

At the time, Russia was denying it had any intention of advancing across the border despite the troop build-up. Three weeks later, on February 24, it invaded.

Mr Johnson said he recalled telling Mr Putin there would be tough sanctions if he invaded, and it would only intensify the West’s support for Kyiv – which would mean “more NATO, not less” on Russian borders.

“He said, ‘Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join NATO any time soon. What is any time soon?’ I said ‘Well, for the foreseeable future – you know that perfectively well’,” Mr Johnson said of the exchange.

The conversation was disclosed in a BBC series called Putin vs the West. The channel also interviewed British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace who made a late attempt to prevent the war by going to Moscow a week after the Johnson-Putin phone call.

Wallace met Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defence, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of general staff who was recently promoted to overall commander of the war in Ukraine. Mr Wallace said his counterparts denied an impending attack and claimed Ukrainians “won’t fight” and would welcome the Russians.

“I remember saying to minister Shoigu ‘they will fight’ and he said, ‘My mother is Ukrainian, they won’t!’ He also said he had no intention of invading,” Mr Wallace said.

“It was the fairly chilling but direct lie of what they were not going to do that I think to me confirmed they were going to do it,” he said.

“As we were walking out General Gerasimov said, ‘Never again will we be humiliated. We used to be the fourth army in the world, we’re now No.2. It’s now America and us.’ And there in that minute was that sense of potentially why (they were doing this).”