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Kremlin boss Putin is said to have lied to and threatened interlocutors. What Boris Johnson, Macron and Olaf Scholz apparently had to experience.
Attempts at intimidation are part of the repertoire of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin. Including threats. Blunt, direct, personal. So did the former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson remembered as told in a BBC documentary. It airs this Monday evening in the UK.
The description is believable. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) fared no differently. “In the first months of the war, Vladimir Putin had Scholz properly threatenedthat Russia could attack Germany if it supplies arms to Ukraine,” journalist and documentary filmmaker Stephan Lamby, who made a film about traffic lights, told Scholz-Update.
The Russians have retained the menacing tone to this day. Ex-President and Putin confidant After the West’s decision to help Ukraine with battle tanks, Dmitry Medvedev wrote in the short message service Telegram: “First, the defense of Ukraine, which nobody in Europe needs, will not protect the decrepit old world from retaliation if something should happen”. Second, should World War III begin, “it will not be fought by tanks or even by fighters, but surely everything will be in ruins”. Also interesting: Leopard Delivery: Why Every “Red Line” Gets Crossed
Putin: How he put off Macron and didn’t take him seriously
Moscow, February 2022: Shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine War Western heads of state and government after another try to dissuade Putin from his plan and yet they do to induce negotiations; be it in Moscow, be it like Johnson on the phone.
Johnson can still remember Putin exactly “very relaxed tone” recall. From this and from the composure that the man from Moscow displayed, the Briton recognized that the many attempts at appeasement were politically priced in. Putin had reckoned with them and probably “just toyed with my attempts to get him to negotiate,” Johnson said.
The French President Emmanuel Macron fared no better. Breaking “diplomatic secrecy,” Macron later provided the journalist with a video recording of a conversation with Putin that took place on February 20, 2022 – just four days before war broke out in Ukraine. Macron wanted to convince the Kremlin boss to hold a summit, a “burden -Minute” crisis diplomacy, which failed at the very outset.
Putin to Johnson: “It would only take a minute with a missile”
Pure waste of time. “In order not to hide anything from you – I was about to go play ice hockey. I’ll call you from the sports hall,” said Putin, Macron followed: “As soon as something’s going on, you’ll call me.” Putin replies sarcastically in French: “Thank you You, Monsieur le Président.”
With Johnson, Putin doesn’t talk around it. “He threatened me at some point and said: ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt youbut with a missile it would only take a minute’ or something like that.” Not quite. Most recently, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Defense Committee Aleksey Zhuravlyov specified on Russian state television on Russia 1 that the RS-28 Sarmat nuclear missile would be capable to hit Great Britain within “200 seconds”. Also interesting: Tank debate at “Anne Will”: Controversial thesis on the war
Johnson refers to the lengthy call as, according to the BBC “out of the ordinary”because the sound on the one hand so menacing, on the other hand “Very confidential” has been. Johnson had made it clear to him at the beginning of February “that an invasion of Ukraine would lead to Western sanctions and more NATO troops on Russia’s borders.” And that’s how it happened.
Johnson once again sent his Secretary of State Ben Wallace to Moscow, who held his talks with Putin in the BBC described as a “show of bullying or strength”. Motto: “I’ll lie to you, you know I lie and I know you know I lie and I’ll still lie to you.” Wallace thinks “it was about saying I’m powerful”.
Ukraine Crisis – The most important news about the war
Putin: Not a statesman, just a crook?
For Johnson, Putin’s performance is “a perfect example of toxic masculinity“. In the summer of 2022 he said on ZDF, “if Putin were a woman, I don’t think he would have started such a crazy, macho war.”
However, there is another explanation for Putin’s behavior – even less flattering. For François Bonnet, co-founder and long-time editor-in-chief of the investigative journal “Revue du Crieur”, a print magazine of the French Internet newspaper “Mediapart”, Putin is not a statesman who pursues controversial political goals, but the boss of a criminal “family”for whom war is a means of securing their own existence and the continued existence of the system they have created and controlled.
For a quarter of a century, Western leaders have refused to acknowledge that Putin a criminal in a politician’s costume not a president with ties to the crime world. “Corruption, murder, incarceration, phenomenal enrichment, the economic exploitation of the country,” says Bonnet, “have always been viewed as collateral damage, as mere side effects that an authoritarian regime that lives off of rent from raw materials produces.” Putin, just a crook ?
Ukraine war – background and explanations for the conflict
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