Putin’s threat to kill Johnson
BORIS JOHNSON has said Vladimir Putin threatened to kill him with a missile, with the Russian adding that it “would only take a minute”.
Following his visit to Kyiv in February last year, Mr Johnson said he had a “very long, most extraordinary call” with the Russian president.
After Britain’s then prime minister described the likely sanctions response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin said: “Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute.”
The revelations come in a new threepart documentary series, Putin vs the West, which is to be shown on BBC Two and BBC iplayer. The programmes, which start tonight, chart how the West has struggled for more than a decade to deal with Putin as he grew in power on the world stage. The series shows how the president publicly maintained he had no plans to invade Ukraine, even as a steady stream of Russian battalions massed at the border.
Mr Johnson says he warned Putin there would be much tougher sanctions if he invaded Ukraine and said Russian aggression would only see the West intensify its support for Ukraine, leading to “more Nato, not less Nato” on Russian borders.
“He said, ‘Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join Nato any time soon. What is any time soon?’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s not going to join Nato for the foreseeable future. You know that perfectly well,’” Mr Johnson said of the crucial phone call with Putin.
“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. 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,” Mr Johnson said. The programme details the lastminute attempt by Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, to stop a renewed assault on Ukraine, following Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea and invasion of the eastern Donbas in 2014.
Less than two weeks before the Feb 24 attack, Mr Wallace visited Moscow, accompanied by The Daily Telegraph. Greeted by Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defence, and Gen Valery Gerasimov, the head of Russia’s armed forces, the latter of whom has since been promoted by Putin to overall commander of the war in Ukraine – Mr Wallace said the Russians were adamant the Ukrainians “won’t fight” and that they “will welcome them”.
“I remember saying to minister Shoigu ‘they will fight’ and he said, ‘My mother is Ukrainian, they won’t!’,” the defence secretary said, adding: “He also said he had no intention of invading.
“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.
“I remember as we were walking out Gen Gerasimov said, ‘Never again will we be humiliated. We used to be the fourth army in the world, we’re now number two. It’s now America and us.’ And there in that minute was that sense of potentially why they were doing this,” Mr Wallace explained.
In the documentary Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said he complained to Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, that his country was not being taken seriously as a prospective
‘Never again will we be humiliated. We used to be fourth army in the world, we’re now number two’
member of the 30-nation alliance. “I told him: ‘Jens, I want to join Nato, do you see us in Nato?’ Because nothing would defend our country except for actual membership,” Mr Zelensky said.
“I said: ‘It’s unfair and not nice. You don’t see us as equals.’ I told him that our army is ready, our society is ready, and I believed that Nato is not ready. If you know that tomorrow Russia will occupy Ukraine, why don’t you give me something today I can stop it with?”