Johnson confronted Putin in a phone call, telling him: "You have no reason to invade Ukraine. There is no way Ukraine will be joining NATO anytime soon," Woodward wrote in the book that has just come out.
The Russian president, Woodward wrote, asked Johnson what he meant by "anytime soon," and Johnson said that "the reality is Ukraine is not going to join in the foreseeable future."
Johnson believed that Putin allegedly wanted Western leaders to state publicly that Ukraine would not join NATO, according to the book.
The author said that the phone call between Putin and Johnson took place after the G20 summit in October 2021, when Johnson and other leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, claimed that US President Joe Biden had told them about the redeployment of Russian troops to the border.
Biden reportedly said that while they had no information about what Russia was "actually thinking, planning and plotting," or whether Moscow actually decided "to pull the trigger," they knew for sure "the gun was cocked."
In September, in his article for The Spectator, the former UK prime minister urged that Ukraine be immediately admitted to NATO "before the war is even over." In his view, this would allow them to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which guarantees the security of "all the Ukrainian territory currently controlled by Ukraine."
Article 5 obligates NATO member states to consider an attack on one of them as an attack on the entire alliance. Johnson believes that this article can also be applied to Ukraine's claim for the return of its lost territories. He also said that the decision to admit Ukraine to NATO would send "the crucial message" to Russia.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting on Johnson's article, said that this could be deemed instigation to NATO’s direct involvement in an armed conflict with Russia.