Boris Johnson has said Vladimir Putin threatened to kill him with a “missile,” and added it “would only take a minute”. Following his visit to Kyiv in early February last year, Mr Johnson said he had a “very long, most extraordinary call” with the Russian president.
After the then-prime minister described the likely sanctions response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin replied: “Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute,” Mr Johnson recalled. The revelations come in a new three-part documentary series titled Putin vs the West which is to be shown on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.
The programmes, which start on Monday, chart how the West has struggled for over a decade to deal with Putin as he grew in power on the world stage. The series shows how publicly the Russian president maintained that his country had no plans to invade Ukraine, even as a steady stream of Russian battalions was heading to the border.
Mr Johnson says he warned Putin there would be much tougher Western sanctions if he invaded Ukraine and said Russian aggression would only lead to the West intensifying 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.
