Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson said was not true or “more precisely, it was a lie.”
The Kremlin claimed today that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson he lied when he stated that the president Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile strike during their phone call before the start of the invasion of Ukraine.
The representative of the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson said was not true or “more preciselyit was a lie”.
“Either it was a deliberate lie – and you have to ask Mr Johnson why he chose to put it that way – or it was an unconscious lie and he didn’t really understand what Putin was telling him.”
Peskov said Putin had explained to Johnson that if Ukraine joined the NATO alliance, deploying US or NATO missiles near Russia’s border would mean any missile could reach Moscow within minutes, and added that there may have been a misunderstanding.
“If that’s how this passage was understood, then it’s a very uncomfortable situation,” Peskov said.
Johnson, speaking to the BBC about the needs of a documentary, said that the Russian leader threatened a missile strike which “will only take a minute.”
“He said to me: ‘Boris, you are saying that Ukraine will not join NATO soon (…) What do you mean when you say ‘soon’?”, says Boris Johnson. “Well, it will not join NATO in the near future, you know that very well,” he adds, as the former prime minister, a big supporter of Kiev, answered him.
“At one point, he seemed to threaten me, he said ‘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 detachment he seemed to have, he was just reacting to my trying to get him to negotiate,” adds the former prime minister, who left Number 10 Downing Street in early September after a series of scandals.
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