Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims Vladimir Putin said he could hit him with a missile

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said President Vladimir Putin didn’t seem to take it seriously about avoiding war in the days before Russia invaded Ukraine – and at one point told the British leader that it would be easy to hit him with a missile. kill.

The Kremlin denied that Putin had made such a threat.

In a documentary released Monday, Johnson says he called Putin last February and tried to dissuade him from war by telling him Ukraine would not join NATO any time soon.

He also warned that an invasion would bring “massive” Western sanctions.

“From the very relaxed tone he took, the kind of aloofness he seemed to have, he just played along with my attempts to get him to negotiate,” Johnson said on the BBC series ‘Putin vs the West’.

Johnson said Putin “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.”

The three-part series by experienced documentary maker Norma Percy tells how Western leaders dealt with the Russian president in the years leading up to the invasion on February 24, 2022.

Percy said Monday she didn’t think Putin was making a direct threat, but “it was a reminder that he could do it, and (Johnson) should remember that when dealing with him”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said his story was not true “or rather, it was a lie”. Peskov said Johnson may have deliberately lied or misunderstood what Putin told him.

“There were no missile threats,” Peskov said on a conference call with reporters.

“While speaking of security challenges for Russia, President Putin said that if Ukraine joins NATO, the possible placement of US or other NATO missiles near our borders would mean that such a missile could reach Moscow within minutes.”

Johnson was one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s most prominent international allies until he was forced from office by numerous scandals in mid-2022.

For more information, watch Euronews’ report in the video above.