Boris Johnson Riles The Kremlin With Story About Meeting Top Putin Aide

Speaking to former Colombian president Ivan Duque last week, the ex-Tory prime minister was talking about the difficulties of dealing with the Kremlin amid ongoing attempts to end the Ukraine war.

Johnson said he had struggled when trying to reset relations with Russia in a 2017 trip to Moscow when he was foreign secretary under Theresa May.

He said: “There’s no compromise with Putin and people need to understand that. I tried to have a reset. I went out to see Putin and he refused to see me.

“So I went to see [Russian foreign affairs minister Sergei] Lavrov, ghastly man, hopeless, and he made me drink a huge amount of vodka in front of a very hot fire.

“It was literally like a Victorian public school punishment. It was terrible. And we got nowhere.

“Then they continued to do really barbaric things, like poison people on the streets of Britain, you know. That was a bitter disappointment to me, trying to make friends with Russia and failing.”

His trip came months before Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned in the UK using a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia.

Though Moscow has always denied involvement, though the UK has since concluded Putin was “morally responsible” for Dawn Sturgess’s death after she mistakenly touched the nerve agent.

She said: “He could have chosen the wine that was in front of him.

“I remember that lunch, Johnson kept asking for more.”

Zakharova then took aim at Liz Truss, who was the foreign secretary under Johnson before she ended up being his successor in No.10.

The Russian spokeswoman told Komsomolskaya Pravda: “Then Liz Truss arrived. Well, even the men were surprised.”

“The atmosphere of an English pub, brought by a British woman, just didn’t fit in with the walls of Morozov’s mansion,” she added, alluding to the reception house of the Russian ministry of foreign affairs.

A former UK diplomat to Russia, Ian Proud, also disputed Johnson’s versions of events on X.

For the record, when he visited Moscow in December 2017, the plan was never for him to meet President Putin. The plan was only and always for Johnson to meet Lavrov.”

Proud called the fireside vodka story “a gross exaggeration”.

He recalled: “There was a meeting with officials present followed by a lunch after which he [Johnson] departed with the whole entourage. Yes alcohol was being served but the idea that Lavrov plied him with vast amounts of vodka is simply untrue.”

He added that UK-Russian relations were “in their best shape for some time” in late 2017 – up until “everything went down the toilet” with the Salisbury poisonings.

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