The West should not make the mistake of “normalizing” relations with Vladimir Putin again after invading Ukraine, Boris Johnson said, warning that allowing Russia to win portends intimidation from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
The prime minister gave his final assessment of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at a Conservative Party conference, calling the Kremlin’s actions “a vicious and barbaric attack on innocent civilians the likes of which we have not seen since the 1940s.”
He warned that if Russia were successful in Ukraine, it would be the end of freedom in Ukraine, would mean the “disappearance of all hope for freedom” in Moldova and Georgia, and would give “the green light to autocrats everywhere.”
Referring to the reaction of the world after Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, he said: “I know there are people in the world, even in some Western governments… who say we’d better compromise with tyranny. I believe that they are deeply mistaken, and trying to normalize relations with Putin after that, as we did in 2014, would be exactly the same mistake.”
Johnson also compared the Ukrainian people’s struggle for freedom to the same instincts of the British population, which narrowly voted for Brexit.
“I know that it is also the instinct of the people of this country to choose freedom every time… When the British voted for Brexit in such a large number… it was because they wanted to have the freedom to do things differently so that this country could do that. something different and manage yourself,” he said.
Johnson gave a speech at the Activists’ Hall in Blackpool. The Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK also attended the event, along with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Defense Secretary Ben Wallace.
The prime minister thanked Wallace for forcing him to read “Putin’s insane essay” about his invasion plan a few months ago. But he was pessimistic about the possibility of overthrowing the Russian leader, saying he did not believe that “democratic freedoms will sprout any time soon” in the country.
Giving his own analysis of Putin’s motives for invading Ukraine, Johnson said it was because the Russian leader feared having a democratic neighbor with a free press and free elections.
“You have to ask yourself why he did this – why did he decide to invade this completely innocent country?
“He did not really believe that Ukraine was going to join NATO in the near future, he knew very well that there was no plan to place missiles on Ukrainian territory.
“He did not really believe in the semi-mystical chatter he wrote about the origin of the Russian people … Nostradamus meets the Russian Wikipedia. That was not the point.
“I think he was afraid of Ukraine for a completely different reason. He was afraid of Ukraine because Ukraine has a free press and Ukraine has free elections.”