Former UK PM Boris Johnson Says Russia's Putin Threatened Him With Missile Attack: Report

Denying the charge, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson had said was not true, or "more precisely, a lie".

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile attack

New Delhi: Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile attack during a phone call in the run-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 

While speaking to BBC for a documentary, Johnson said, "He threatened me at one point, and he said, 'Boris, I don't want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute' or something like that. Jolly," recalling the "very long" and "most extraordinary" call in February 2022 which followed a visit by the then prime minister to Kyiv.

Johnson suggested that he didn’t regard Putin’s comments as a serious threat.

"But 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," he added.

Johnson said that the Russian leader had asked him about the prospects of Ukraine joining NATO, to which he had responded it would not be "for the foreseeable future".

Denying the charge, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson had said was not true, or "more precisely, a lie".

He stated that the former prime minister's claim was "either a deliberate falsehood, in which case you need to ask Mr Johnson why he lied, or it was not a deliberate lie. That is, he didn't understand what President Putin was saying to him".

“Speaking about challenges to the security of the Russian Federation, President Putin noted that if Ukraine joined NATO the potential deployment of NATO or American missiles near our borders would mean that any missile would reach Moscow in minutes. If this passage was perceived in this way, it is very embarrassing,” he added.

Relations between Moscow and London had sunk to their lowest level in decades even before Russia invaded Ukraine, on the back of the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury in 2018.

(With inputs from Reuters)