'Slower than a slug', Boris Johnson hits out at 'frail' Putin
The former UK prime minister urged the Coalition of the Willing to deploy now, and not wait for Trump
Boris Johnson gave a characteristically colourful and morally clear speech on the way forward for Ukraine in an unusually low-key public appearance in London this week.
The former leader of the Conservative Party, who served as prime minister of the UK between 2019 and 2022 and during the time of Vladimir Putin’s illegal and full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was speaking to the Borderlands Foundation alongside one of Donald Trump’s many former national security advisers, H.R. McMaster.
It was a rare public appearance on home soil for the former prime minister, who regularly frequents the lucrative international speaking circuit, although I’m told he was not paid for this speech. In fact, when organisers offered to buy his books in lieu of a speaker’s fee, this was also declined.
Mr Johnson was one of Kyiv’s earliest allies at the start of the full-scale invasion and is credited with rallying both British and European support for Ukraine in 2022.
Since leaving office, he has held firm on the war as he did when he addressed The Borderlands Foundation. He began by addressing Russia’s largest-ever drone and missile strike on Kyiv this weekend.
Russia sent 810 Shahed-type drones, 9 Iskander-K cruise missiles, and 4 Iskander-M ballistic missiles Kyiv’s way on Saturday. The attack hit a government building for the first time, and among the dead was a mother and her two-month-old baby.
‘Perhaps my feelings were sharpened because, you may not believe it, but I actually have a baby of about that age myself,’ the 61-year-old former prime minister said.
‘I gave way to absolute hatred and contempt for what the Russian president is doing.’
Johnson went on to mock the Russian leader, comparing the pace of Putin’s battlefield gains to that of a garden snail.
‘An all-out war since 2022, he’s still only captured less than 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory at a cost of a million Russian casualties,’ Johnson observed.
‘And I think it has been calculated that if a common or garden snail had set out to cross Russia at the same time as Putin dispatched his 115 battalion tactical groups in February 2022, the snail would now be in Poland.
‘So Putin is not only morally inferior, he's actually slower than the average slug.’
It was a great line that went down well in the room, which was filled with many Ukrainian veterans and defence industry types, and just a handful of journalists, including myself.
Mr Johnson then attacked Putin personally, saying he thought the 72-year-old Russian leader looked ‘notably frailer’ in public.
‘There’s something a bit odd about his gait these days,’ he said.
‘The way he holds himself — this isn't the bad chested bareback riding Putin who used to go off chasing … whatever they are … and fooling around with snow, leopards, and so on.
‘This is an ageing leader who knows he has made a terrible mistake but cannot find the way out, and it is therefore time to show him the way out and to show what I think subconsciously knows to be the truth, that he has lost.’
In a subtle dig at President Trump’s negotiating tactics, which included a red-carpet welcome to Alaska last month, Mr Johnson said no amount of schmoozing would work.
‘There’s only one set of arguments that he understands and it isn’t flattery,’ he said.
‘You can’t schmooze Putin.
‘You won’t change his calculations by red carpet treatment or flypasts right?
‘That’s not going to cut the mustard.
‘It’s frankly insane to think there’s some deal to be done by offering Putin the chance now to gain land in Donbass that he currently does not even occupy and has never occupied throughout the conflict.’
President Trump has threatened more sanctions on Russia, which would be the first he would impose alongside the EU since coming to power.
‘I’m not happy, I’m not happy, I’m not happy about the whole situation,’ Mr Trump said when asked about Putin’s attack on Kyiv this week.
‘I’m not thrilled about what’s happening there.
‘I think it’s going to get settled.’
Mr Johnson backed more sanctions on Russia well as expanding secondary sanctions to China as well as India.
He also called for the estimated $300 billion in frozen Russian assets, the bulk of which are being held in Belgium, to go to Ukraine.
Currently, Western leaders have used the profits from those assets but have not moved to take the assets themselves.
But his most sit-up-and-take-notice remarks were those that he made around the so-called Coalition of the Willing.
The Coalition of the Willing, or Reassurance Force, was first proposed by France and the UK.
But the talk of ‘boots on the ground,’ including non-NATO ones, has been pushed by France and the Baltic countries for a lot longer, as listeners of this episode of Latika Takes: The Podcast will recall.
While more than 30 countries, including non-NATO and European allies such as Japan, New Zealand and Australia, are part of the talks, the concept remains amorphous.
A total of 26 countries have agreed to some sort of military contribution, but governments are cagey about what they would deploy and where.
Notably, when I interviewed Czechia’s Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský on last weekend’s episode of the podcast, he was unable to say even if his country would deploy any sort of military force — and the Czech Republic is one of Europe’s most fervent supporters.
‘There’s a part we cannot speak about because this touches the military planning,’ Lipavský said.
‘But we part of that military planning and all of those scenarios are connected to the ceasefire or the peace deal situation.’
Last week, the Vice Admiral overseeing Australia’s military contributions to Ukraine’s war effort, Justin Jones, was in London and said he remained involved in the military planning.
But he similarly had zero to offer in the way of details when I asked what sort of contributions, even if they would be related to defending and protecting Ukraine’s land, sea or skies, Australia might make.
‘We will wait until there is a peace deal of some sorts and then wait for our government’s direction on how it wants to handle it,’ he said during a press conference at Australia House.
‘We would have a range of options from which the government can choose and I’m going to disclose that before the government has a chance to consider those options.’
But Boris Johnson believes this is all the wrong way around.
‘My question to European leaders now, UK - everywhere, is if immediate membership of NATO is off the table now and I very much regret that it is but why don't we not only assemble the Coalition of the Willing but also begin the deployment of that Coalition?’ Johnson said.
‘This thing, this entity, whatever it is – peacekeeping force, boots on the ground, whatever they do, they are not going to engage Russians in war fights, that is just not going to happen.
‘That being so, there is nothing to stop them going now.
‘That's what we should do. We should deploy them now.
‘They’re there for political purposes, they’re there to show that the ultimate destiny of Ukraine is part of the Western security architecture, get them in now.’
As Michael Kofman, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment, noted during a panel discussion alongside Mr Johnson, Europe’s Reassurance Force only became a thing when Europe feared it would be cut out of any Trump-Putin peace deal and needed to bring some chips to the bargaining table.
The Europeans insist that the force must have the ultimate protection of US security guarantees — a so-called backstop.
Kofman believes a reassurance force would serve as an effective deterrent.
‘There is a degree of deterrence offered by the ambiguity,’ he said.
‘And I know folks always worry about what if they're attacked by Russians and my immediate answer as a military analyst is if people are so afraid that any casualties would be lost in this kind of deployment, then we have a larger credibility problem.
‘Lastly, I don't think Russia is going to necessarily be that eager to tackle this force either.
‘There are potential consequences and uncertainties for them as well.’
Kofman also backed not waiting for a ceasefire.
‘It's not that often when a ceasefire is made that the ceasefire doesn't in some way also break down,’ he said.