The former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson allegedly tried to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021 that Ukraine would not join NATO in the foreseeable future, British magazine The Daily Express reported on October 15, citing the book "War" by US journalist Bob Woodward.
The author of "War" said that the phone call between Putin and Johnson took place after the G20 summit in October 2021, when Johnson and other European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, claimed that US President Joe Biden had told them about the redeployment of Russian troops to the border.
In September, in his article for the magazine The Spectator, the former UK prime minister urged that Ukraine be immediately admitted to NATO before the end of the conflict. In his view, this would allow them to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which obligates NATO member states to consider an attack on one of them as an attack on the entire alliance.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting on Johnson's article, said that this could be deemed an instigation to NATO’s direct involvement in an armed conflict with Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that NATO’s expansion to include Ukraine would create a direct national security threat to Russia and that Moscow considers the non-aligned status of Ukraine to be extremely important to put an end to the Ukraine conflict.