OREANDA-NEWS  Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tried to assure Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would not join NATO "in the near future," this happened during their telephone conversation at the end of January 2022. 

In the book, Johnson recalls that in response to his remarks about the inadmissibility of deploying Russian military personnel on the border with Ukraine, Putin replied that Moscow had a legitimate right to do so because of fears that Ukraine might join the Western military bloc.

"I was annoyed. Yes, it is true that NATO expanded after the end of the Cold War... But Ukraine? TO NATO? Now? Personally, I thought it was a good and reasonable idea, but [Putin] I knew as well as I did that there was no chance of Ukraine joining NATO, at least for a very long time. I said that all this is completely unrealistic," the book says.

Earlier it became known that on the eve of a special military operation (SVO) of Russia, some German politicians offered to "sacrifice Ukraine" in order to avoid economic problems.