Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with missiles during a phone call ahead of the invasion of Ukraine.
Johnson said the Russian leader asked him about Ukraine’s prospects for joining NATO, to which the former British prime minister replied that it would not happen “in the near future,” Reuters reported.
“He threatened me and said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with the missile it only took a minute,'” Johnson said, recalling a “very long” conversation with the Russian president in February. 2022.
“But I think, judging by the very relaxed tone with which he spoke, he was just playing with my attempts to get him to negotiate,” Boris Johnson said.
Johnson, who resigned in September after a series of scandals, has sought to position London as Kyiv’s main ally in the West. During his tenure, he visited the Ukrainian capital several times and made frequent phone calls to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.