The Kremlin calls Boris Johnson a liar over claims Putin threatened to kill him

A claim by Boris Johnson earlier that Russian President Vladimir Putin had said he could kill him with a missile has resulted in the Kremlin calling the former prime minister a liar.

Johnson had claimed in an interview over the weekend that Putin had threatened to kill him during a phone call in which he had warned the Russian not to invade Ukraine.

But on Monday, January 30 Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that what Johnson claimed was not true, or “more precisely, a lie.”

Johnson had said that Putin told him: “I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute.”

Peskov said: “There were no threats of missiles.

“It is either a deliberate lie – so you have to ask Mr Johnson why he chose to put it that way – or it was an unconscious lie and he did not in fact understand what Putin was talking to him about.”

Peskov went on to day it is possible that Johnson may have misunderstood Putin who was talking about the possibility of NATO missiles being placed minutes away from Moscow.

He added: “If that’s how this passage was understood, then it’s a very awkward situation.”

Johnson said that in the conversation he had told Putin that any escalation in Ukraine would only result in increased support from NATO, “more NATO, not less.”

He said that “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.

“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.”

There has been no independent verification of the claims by Johnson, who the Kremlin have called a liar over claims Putin threatened to kill him.

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