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Former British leader Boris Johnson has accused warmongering Russian President Vladimir Putin of personally threatening to “hurt” him with a missile just days before the Ukraine war.
The ex-prime minister told a BBC documentary that Putin, 70, made the chilling threat during the “most extraordinary call” in February, as Russian troops massed near the border of Ukraine to invade that month.
“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,” Johnson, 58, claimed.
“You know, jolly,” he added with a nervous smile as he made a classic British understatement.
“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” and stay out of Ukraine, Johnson said.
The threat came as Putin’s paranoia was rising that Ukraine was about to join NATO, a long-held fear used to justify the brutal war that has dragged on for more than 11 months.
Boris Johnson told the BBC that Putin “threatened” him during a “most extraordinary call” last February.REUTERS 
Johnson said Putin told him: “‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute.’”MIKHAEL KLIMENTYEV/KREMLIN/POOL/
Johnson, 58, mimicked Putin saying his name as he recalled him challenging the UK’s asertion that Ukraine was not joining NATO “anytime soon.”
“He said it in English — ‘Anytime soon. What is anytime soon?’” Johnson recalled, with the former PM saying he explained to the Russian leader that it meant at least for “the foreseeable future.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson had said was not true — or “more precisely, a lie.”
The Kremlin called Johnson’s claim “a lie.”Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images
“There were no threats to use missiles,” Peskov added to the BBC, saying that Johnson’s claim was “either a deliberate falsehood” or “he didn’t understand what President Putin was saying to him.”
The Kremlin leader had merely noted that “if Ukraine joined NATO, the potential deployment of NATO or US missiles near Russia’s border would mean that any missile could reach Moscow within minutes,” the Kremlin mouthpiece claimed.
At the time of the alleged call, Russia was still adamantly denying plans to invade its neighbor, which the UK knew was just the latest lie, UK officials confirmed in the documentary, “Putin Vs. the West.”
Johnson is seen as a hero by many in Ukraine for his support against Russia’s brutal war.AP
Such assurances were made to UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace when he flew to Moscow just a few weeks before the invasion, he told the doc.
Wallace called the “fairly chilling, but direct lie” an attempt to show that Putin was “powerful.”
It was a “demonstration of bullying or strength, which is: ‘I’m going to lie to you, you know I’m lying and I know you know I’m lying and I’m still going to lie to you,’” Wallace said.
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