‘With a rocket, it will take a minute’: Boris Johnson tells how Vladimir Putin ‘threatened him’

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tells in a BBC documentary that Russian President Vladimir Putin “threatened” him days before ordering his army’s invasion of Ukrainetelling him that “with a rocket, it will take a minute”.

In this three-part documentary, the first of which will be broadcast tonight on BBC Two, the former Tory government leader talks about his “very long” and “excellent” conversation with the Russian president following his visit to Kyiv in early February 2022.

Even then the Vladimir Putin he continued to assure that he had no intention of ordering an invasion of the neighboring country, despite the massive concentration of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border.

Mr Johnson says he warned the Russian president that the West would impose heavy sanctions on Russia if it went down the path of armed conflict.

The documentary also features Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who does not hide that he was furious with the behavior of Western leaders before the outbreak of war: “If you know that tomorrow Russia will invade Ukraine, why don’t you give me something with which can i stop her? And if you can’t, stop it yourself”, he recounts what he said, as broadcast by international agencies and relayed by the Athens News Agency.

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

“I remember saying to Minister Shoigu ‘they will fight’, he replied ‘my mother is Ukrainian, they will not fight’. He also said he had no intention of breaking in,” states Mr. Wallace.

“That was something they would call ‘Vranie’ in Russian. “Vranie” means show of force, intimidation: I will lie to you. You’ll know I’m lying. I’ll know you know 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 powerful.”

“It was the relatively creepy but outright lie that they weren’t going to do it that convinced me they were going to do it. I remember that as we were going out 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 America now too.” And at that moment I got the feeling that potentially that might be the reason” they would break in, Mr. Wallace argues.