Putin threatened UK ex-pm with missile strike on phone

LONDON - Former British prime minister Boris Johnson said Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile strike during a phone call ahead of the invasion of Ukraine.

Johnson, who was speaking to the BBC for a documentary, said that the Russian leader asked him about the prospects of Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which he had said would not be for the foreseeable future. He threatened to hurt me but, with a missile, it would only take a minute or something like that. Johnson said Jolly was recalling the very long and most extraordinary call in February 2022, which followed a visit by the then prime minister to Kyiv.

But I think from the relaxed tone 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. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2018, relations between Moscow and London had sunk to their lowest level in decades, on the back of the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury in 2018.

Johnson, who stepped down in September 2022 after a series of scandals, tried to position London as Kyiv's top ally in the West.

He visited Kyiv several times while he was in office and called on Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy frequently.