Johnson lied about Putin’s missile threat, Moscow insists
THE Kremlin yesterday accused Boris Johnson of lying after the former prime minister said Vladimir Putin threatened to assassinate him with a missile strike.
Mr Johnson said the Russian president “sort of threatened me” during a telephone conversation before he launched his invasion of Ukraine.
“He 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 told a BBC Two television documentary, Putin vs the West.
Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said yesterday that Mr Johnson’s claim was untrue “or, more precisely, it was a lie. There were no threats with missiles.”
He added: “While talking about security challenges to Russia, President Putin said that if Ukraine joins Nato, the potential deployment of US or other Nato missiles near our borders would mean that any such missile could reach Moscow in minutes.”
Mr Johnson told the documentary producers that he had an “extraordinary” conversation with the Russian leader last February. He said Mr Putin had a “very relaxed tone” and an “air of detachment” when they spoke days before the war began on Feb 24. “He was playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate,” Mr Johnson said.
In an op-ed for The Washington Post yesterday, Mr Johnson said the Russian president has paved the way for Ukrainian membership of Nato. The war has “vaporised” the case against admitting Ukraine to the alliance, he said. The argument that allowing Ukraine to join Nato would be “provocative” to Russia is no longer valid, he added, admitting that as prime minister he “should never have accepted” this argument.