Mon 30 January 2023:
The Russian embassy in London warned of an increase in European tensions after the chairman of the British defense select committee said the UK should “face Russia directly” over Ukraine.
“This and similar remarks, including arguments that Tobias Ellwood, the head of the Commons’ defense committee, made today in favor of facing Russia directly are only escalating the already acute military and political tensions on the European continent,” its statement read.
The diplomatic mission added that such rhetoric would only draw the UK deeper into the confrontation between Ukraine and Russia.
It also lambasted former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for distorting what President Vladimir Putin told him in a private conversation just before Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine last February.
PUTIN ‘THREATENED ME’ WITH MISSILE STRIKE, FORMER UK PM JOHNSON SAYS
Johnson, speaking to the BBC for a documentary, said Putin had asked him about the prospects of Ukraine joining NATO, to which he had responded it would not be “for the foreseeable future”.
“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. Jolly,” Johnson said, recalling the “very long” and “most extraordinary” call in February 2022 which followed a visit by the then-prime minister to Kyiv.
“But 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.”
President Putin had been “very familiar” during the “most extraordinary call”, Johnson said.
Nine days after Mr Johnson’s conversation with President Putin, on 11 February, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace flew to Moscow to meet his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu.
The Kremlin has accused Boris Johnson of lying after the former British prime minister said President Vladimir Putin had threatened the United Kingdom with a missile strike during a phone call in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson said was not true, or “more precisely, a lie”.
The Kremlin leader, he said, had simply pointed out 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”.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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