Putin 'didn't threaten either me or Germany' over different stance on Ukraine war: Scholz

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz denied receiving any threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin, contrary to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who recently claimed that the Russian leader had blatantly warned him of a missile strike. In a conversation with German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, Scholz said that Putin “did not threaten either me or Germany" in any of the phone conversations held between the duo.

Providing clarity on the heated issue of supplying military tanks to war-torn Ukraine, Scholz said that "Germany will keep a cool head and continue weighing in all the decisions in the future. All the other things would be careless and extremely dangerous. The consensus is in place in this regard.” 

“I make it very clear to Putin that Russia has sole responsibility for the war. In our telephone conversations, our very different positions on the war in Ukraine become very clear,” he said.

Boris Johnson claims Vladimir Putin gave him a missile threat

Last week, erstwhile British premier Boris Johnson said in a three-part docuseries titled 'Putin vs the West' that the Russian President had “sort of” given him a missile attack threat during a phone conversation last year when Russia and Ukraine were on the brink of war. “He sort of threatened me at one point and said: ‘Boris, I don’t want to hurt you, but with a missile, it would only take a minute’, or something like that,” the former Conservative Party leader said, according to The Independent. 

He later said that Putin’s “very relaxed tone” in the conversation hinted at the possibility that he was simply “playing along.” "But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate," Johnson said.

However, the ex-PM’s wild claims were refuted by the Kremlin, which said that they were untrue, “or, more precisely, it was a lie.” “There were no threats with missiles,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, adding that either Johson was lying, or had failed to understand what Putin had said to him.