Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump had been president, Boris Johnson has suggested, saying the world is a better place when the United States has a strong leader. The former prime minister believes that Trump’s unpredictability would have been enough to persuade Putin not to take the risk of going to war with a sovereign country. In an exclusive interview with ahead of the publication of his memoir, , he said: “From the Kremlin’s point of view, there was a real risk that Trump would have construed an attack on a European country as an affront to America and to the world order, and might have come down hard.
” Johnson also reveals that when he was foreign secretary, his staff found , the prime minister of Israel. In a wide-ranging conversation, he also says he would back a referendum on membership of the (ECHR), warns that the Government is “tiptoeing” Britain back towards EU membership, and that it was a mistake to employ – to investigate partygate. Trump is never shy to point out that Russia’s invasions of Ukraine happened on either side of his presidency, and not while he was president, and Johnson agrees that this is no coincidence.
He says: “One of the virtues of Trump is his sheer unpredictability. That’s one of the reasons why I look at how he actually behaved on foreign affairs and I contrast it with what people say about him. “He expelled 60 Russian spies [after the Salisbury poisonings].
He was much tougher on Syria tha.
