Boris: I was too optimistic about Putin
BORIS Johnson says he now regrets believing he could transform Britain’s relationship with Russia. He told an event in Washington DC that the final straw was the novichok attack in Salisbury.
‘I made the classic, classic mistake of thinking it was possible to have a re-set with Russia,’ the former foreign secretary said.
‘I wanted to engage with Putin and his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to see if we could start talking about areas, like Syria, where we needed to engage ... like tackling Islamist terrorism. Then it just became clearer and clearer to me that that was a fool’s errand.’
He said the nerve agent attack in March made his ‘blood boil’.
When pressed on whether trusting the Russians was his biggest mistake, Mr Johnson replied: ‘It wasn’t that I trusted them, I believed that I was sufficiently over-confident to think that I could reach out and engage and make a difference. And they haven’t changed.’
ThIS was the week Russian President Vladimir Putin’s utter contempt for the lawbased international order was exposed for the whole world to see.
Indeed, his open mockery of the West’s values, when he put the Salisbury assassins on TV to tell a cock-and-bull story about being innocent day-trippers, would almost be laughable if this weren’t such a deadly serious matter.
But deadly it is. Through this repulsive stunt, insulting the public’s intelligence and thumbing his nose at the British Government and police, Mr Putin effectively admitted he sent henchmen to commit murder on British soil – with enough nerve agent, say the security services, to kill 4,000.
Who can now doubt that guilt for the poisoning of Dawn Sturgess, who died in consequence of the attempt on the lives of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, lies unmistakably at his door?
Forget Boris Johnson’s fake bravado in daring the two assassins to sue him for branding them ‘murderers’ (hardly a courageous stand, after Theresa May had said as much in the Commons).
After the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, the only wonder is that it has taken Western politicians so long to realise that in trying to reason with the Russian president, they are dealing with a gangster who will stop at nothing to get his way.
Since the killers’ macabre TV appearance, surely nobody – except perhaps the Kremlinbesotted ‘useful idiots’ who surround Jeremy Corbyn – will make the mistake of trusting him again.
This paper earnestly hopes that with the scales now fallen from political leaders’ eyes, the West will join forces to explore ways of containing the threat Mr Putin poses.
One thing’s for sure: with Russia now engaged in the largest-scale war games since the fall of the Soviet Union – involving 300,000 troops, 36,000 military vehicles and 1,000 aircraft – the potency of that threat can hardly be exaggerated.