Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened his life with a missile strike following criticism of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
Johnson said that the Russian strongman noted that such an act would "only take a minute" and was made after the former UK prime minister warned that the war between Russia and Ukraine would be an "utter catastrophe."
Putin's Missile Threat Against Johnson
The claim was made during a BBC documentary focusing on the Russian president's interactions with several world leaders in the last few years. In response to the allegations, a spokesman for the Kremlin said that Johnson's assertions were lies.
The former UK prime minister previously warned Putin that moving forward with an invasion of Ukraine would lead to Western sanctions and the deployment of more NATO troops along Russia's borders.
Furthermore, Johnson attempted to deter the Russian military's action by telling the Russian president that Ukraine would not join the global military alliance "for the foreseeable future." However, he noted that at one point, Putin threatened him, as per BBC.
The former prime minister added that based on Putin's relaxed tone and his alleged detachment, he was only playing along with Johnson's attempts at negotiations. He said the Russian president had been "very familiar" during their call.
There is no definitive way to verify whether or not Putin's threat to launch a missile strike at Johnson was genuine. However, with Russia's previous attacks on the UK, the most recent being in 2018 in Salisbury, any threat from the Russian president is something that the former UK prime minister would take seriously.
Putin's spokesman said that Johnson's claim was either a deliberate falsehood, which begs the question of why he lied, or was not a deliberate lie. This means he needed help understanding what the Russian president was trying to tell him.
Johnson has become one of the most impassioned Western supporters of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The documentary where the UK official made the remarks charted the growing division between Putin and the West several years before the invasion, according to France24.
Johnson's Support of Ukraine
Furthermore, it features Zelensky reflecting on his ambitions, which were pushed back when he tried to have Ukraine join NATO before Russia's military operation. He questioned world leaders that if they knew, for a fact, that Moscow would attack Ukraine, why they would not give the country a way to fight back.
In the decades before Russia invaded Ukraine, relations between Moscow and London have continued to sink to their lowest level. This has been due to the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in 2018. The former UK prime minister sought to position London as Kyiv's top ally among Western nations. While in office, Johnson visited Ukraine multiple times and called Zelensky quite frequently, said Rappler.
In the documentary, Johnson also said that he told Putin that further escalation of relations between Russia and Ukraine would only lead to additional support for Kyiv from Western states. This means that there would be more NATO involvement instead of less, as Moscow wanted.