Boris Johnson branded Vladimir Putin “very creepy” and a “small, puckish lowlife” (Image: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
The British PM confronted Putin in a phone call in the autumn of 2021, telling him: “You have no reason to invade Ukraine. There is no way Ukraine will be joining Nato anytime soon.”
According to Woodward, 81, whose sensational new book, War, charts the behind the scenes story of the Russian invasion in February 2022, Putin replied: “What do you mean by anytime soon? When is that? Next month?” Boris insisted to the Russian leader: “The reality is Ukraine is not going to join in the foreseeable future”. He believed Putin knew there was no way Ukraine would be joining Nato but wanted to goad Western leaders into stating it publicly.
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The fateful phone call came in the wake of the G20 Summit in Rome in October 2021 when Boris and world leaders, including US president Joe Biden, French premier Emmanuel Macron, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her soon-to-be successor Olaf Scholz, were secretly briefed on Russian’s invasion plans.
The room had been swept for bugs to ensure the 12 people were not covertly listened to as President Biden told them: “We’ve all seen that the Russian has re-massed forces on the border as they did in April. We now have information about what they are actually thinking, planning and plotting. What we don’t know is whether they’ve actually decided to pull the trigger, but the gun is cocked.”
While Boris, who had been similarly briefed by MI6 and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, found the intelligence “entirely credible”, according to Woodward’s new book, which is published tomorrow, Macron and the two German politicians remained sceptical.
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“Perhaps it was Putin’s bluff, but Johnson believed Putin was monstrous to even be thinking about it,” writes Woodward, the legendary investigative journalist who, along with Carl Bernstein, helped bring down President Richard Nixon over his Watergate scandal.
The whole thing was a “game” for Putin, he had the West in a “trap”, thought Boris, but he insisted that publicly contradicting Nato’s open-door policy to new members would be an “admission of defeat”.
It was then that he confided in an associate that Putin was a “small, puckish lowlife”.
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Just a few months later, on February 24, 2022, Russian forces would roll across the Ukrainian border for Putin’s “special military operation”. Their rapid victory however failed utterly and today, more than two-and-a-half years later, the conflict has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
War by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, ￡25) is published tomorrow