Ding, ding, ding! In the red corner, it’s the menacing goons of Moscow’s Red Square. And in the blue corner, it’s Boris Johnson, the garrulous, gung-ho, onetime Tory premier. Johnson has done an interview for a BBC documentary being released tonight, in which he reveals that Putin threatened to kill him over the UK’s support for Ukraine.

The pair spoke ahead of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, during Moscow’s build up of troops on Kyiv’s eastern front. During a ‘jolly’ chat between the two of them ‘on the blower’, the Russian leader warned Boris in his half-menacing, half-joking way that he could easily take him out. According to Johnson:

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.

Now though, Kremlin officials have hit back at the claim, which makes the front page of today’s Mail. Putin’s spin-doctors insist there were ‘no threats with missiles’ during the bilateral conversation held in February 2022. An indignant Dmitry Peskov told Moscow’s hand-picked reporters on Monday that Johnson’s account was untrue, ‘or, more precisely, it was a lie.’

Being accused of being a liar by the Kremlin? They would know after all…