In the early hours of Friday, at 3.24am, Downing Street sent out the transcript of a telephone conversation Boris Johnson had had with Volodymyr Zelenskyy a short time earlier. The two agreed that Russia must stop the attack on the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant immediately, it said. “The Prime Minister said that the irresponsible actions of President Putin are now threatening all of Europe.” Johnson also assured the Ukrainian President that he would request a special session of the UN Security Council in the next few hours to discuss the issue.
For weeks, such “readouts” of phone calls with Zelenskyy and other heads of state and government have been made from Downing Street, sometimes every hour. The message is clear: Johnson is on the front lines of the West. He and his most important aides, Secretary of State Liz Truss and Secretary of Defense Ben Wallace, made several trips to the continent or to America. Johnson’s relationship with Moscow, which had been strained for years, forbade him from sitting at a table with Putin like Emmanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz, but he was also in touch with the warlord in the Kremlin by telephone.