Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says in a BBC documentary that Russian President Vladimir Putin “threatened” him days before ordering his army to invade Ukraine, telling him “with a missile it would take a minute “.

In this three-part documentary, the first of which will air tonight on BBC Two, the former Conservative government chief recounts his “very long” and “excellent” conversation with the Russian president following his visit to Kyiv in early February 2022.

Even then, Vladimir Putin continued to insist that he was not going to order an invasion of a neighboring country, despite the massive concentration of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine.

According to Johnson, he warned the Russian president that the West would impose tough sanctions on Russia if it went down the path of armed conflict.

“He told me: ‘Boris, you are saying that Ukraine will not join NATO soon (…) What do you mean when you say ‘soon’?” Boris Johnson says. “Well, it won’t join NATO in the near future, you know that very well,” he adds, as the former prime minister, a big supporter of Kyiv, replied to him.

“At one point, he seemed to be threatening me, saying, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a rocket it will take a minute’ or something like that,” says Boris Johnson.

“I think given his very calm tone, the aloofness he seemed to have, he was simply reacting to my attempts to get him to negotiate,” adds the former prime minister, who left 10 Downing Street at the start of the September after a series of scandals. .

The documentary also features Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is openly furious at the behavior of Western leaders before the start of the war: “If you know that tomorrow Russia will invade Ukraine, why don’t you give me something with which I can I stop her? And if you can’t, stop it yourself,” he said.

In the same documentary, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace talks about his trip to Moscow in February 2022 as part of his efforts to prevent the outbreak of war. He says that he met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.

“I remember telling Minister Shoigu that they would fight, he replied: “My mother is Ukrainian, they will not fight.” He also said he wasn’t going to break in,” Mr. Wallace says.

“This is what they called “Vranye” in Russian. “Lies” means a show of force, intimidation: I will lie to you. You will know that I am lying. I’ll know that you know that I’m lying, I’ll lie to you anyway. He knew that I knew and I knew that he knew. But I think the message he wanted to send was that he is strong.”

“The relatively creepy but outright lie that they weren’t going to do it convinced me that they were going to do it. I remember when we were leaving, General Gerasimov said: “We will never be humiliated again. We had the fourth largest army in the world, now we have the second largest. We are now America too.” And at that moment, I had a feeling that this could potentially be the reason that they would break in, – says Mr. Wallace.

Source: RES-IPE