The Kremlin has denied former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened him with a missile strike.
The two were on a "very long" and "extraordinary" call in early February of last year before Russia invaded Ukraine, when Putin supposedly issued the threat, though he also conceded it could've been a joke.
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“He sort of threatened me at one point and said, ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute,’ or something like that. You know … jolly,” the former U.K. prime minister said. “From the 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."
Johnson, who was in office when Russia invaded Ukraine, made the accusation in a new BBC documentary that is set to air on Monday, though the clip was teased as an excerpt.
“He said, ‘Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join NATO anytime soon. … What is anytime soon?’ and I said, 'Well, it's not going to join NATO for the foreseeable future. You know that perfectly well,'" Johnson added.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Putin ever made any such threat, calling it "a lie."
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“It’s a lie, there were no threats of missiles,” he told reporters during a press briefing. “Speaking about challenges to the security of the Russian Federation, President Putin noted that if Ukraine joined NATO, the potential deployment of NATO or American missiles near our borders would mean that any missile would reach Moscow in minutes. If this passage was perceived in this way, it is very embarrassing,” he said.
In his time as prime minister, Johnson was a big ally of Ukraine, going as far as to travel to Kyiv for an unannounced visit back in April.