Johnson said Putin said this in a “very long” and “dramatic” call in early February of last year, when Russian troops were advancing en masse along the Ukrainian border. Johnson, then Prime Minister, recently visited Kiev to show Western support for Ukraine.
“At one point he threatened me and said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it only takes a minute,’ or something like that. You know… Jolly,” Johnson said.
Russia has one of the world’s largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons, including long-range missiles, but Johnson said he did not view Putin’s comments as a serious threat.
“The calm tone, the kind of detachment he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate,” Johnson said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Putin had threatened Johnson with a missile strike and said the former prime minister was either deliberately not telling the truth or had misunderstood the Russian president.
“It is a lie, there was no missile threat,” he told reporters during the press conference. “Discussing the challenges to the security of the Russian Federation, President Putin said that if Ukraine joins NATO, any missile that NATO or US missiles can deploy near our border will reach Moscow within minutes. This episode is very embarrassing,” he said.
Johnson, for his part, warned Putin at the talks that there would be tougher sanctions if an invasion occurred and that the West would strengthen its support for Ukraine, which he said would be “more, not less, NATO” on Russia’s border.
“He said: ‘Boris, you say that Ukraine will not join NATO soon.’ What time is soon?’ And I said, ‘Well, joining NATO is not going to happen in the future. You know this very well,’ Johnson recalled of the exchange. Three weeks after their call, on February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Johnson tried to position himself as one of the most supportive of Ukraine. A week ago, he made a surprise visit to Kiev – despite having no official role in the British government since he was ousted in September after a string of scandals – and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky, pledging that Britain would “hold on to Ukraine as long as it takes”.
In separate comments from excerpts of the documentary “Putin vs. the West,” which aired Monday night, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace spoke about exchanges with Russian officials during a visit to Moscow last February.
Speaking about his meeting with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of the Military General Staff said: “I remember Minister Shoigu saying ‘they will fight’, my mother is Ukrainian, they won.” ‘T!’ He said he had no intention of invading.
“This would be ‘vran’e’ in Russian. ‘Vran’e’ I think is a sign of bully or strength: I’m going to lie to you. You know I’m lying. I know I’m lying, and I’m still going to lie to you. He knew I knew, and I knew he knew. But I think it’s about saying I’m powerful.
I think it proved to me that what they didn’t want to do was a cold but outright lie. I remember as we were walking out, General Gerasimov said, ‘We will not be humiliated any longer. We were the fourth army in the world and now we are number two. Now it’s America and us.’ And in that minute there was a feeling of guessing why. [they were doing this]He said.
Natalia Abakumova in Riga, Latvia contributed to this report.