Boris Johnson delivered a forthright message to China this weekend over its refusal to condemn Russia.
There were now “considerable dilemmas” for those who thought they could sit on the fence, the prime minister said, adding: “I think that in Beijing you are starting to see some second thoughts.”
Johnson was speaking on the return leg of a 9,000-mile round-trip to the Middle East. He had been hoping to do a deal in the desert that would reduce Britain’s reliance on Russia’s oil and gas supply.
The trip came amid co-ordinated diplomatic efforts by western leaders to put pressure on President Putin, with Johnson sending his strongest message yet to China, warning Beijing that backing Russia’s attack was like picking the wrong side in the Second World War, describing it as a battle between good and evil.
He accused Putin of trying to establish a new authoritarian world order and warned China it risked being on the wrong side of history.
Advertisement
The prime minister’s meetings with Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi came despite warnings there would be a slim chance of success.
Together, the two Middle Eastern leaders control a significant slice of the world’s oil and gas reserves. With UK petrol prices soaring as western sanctions bite against the regime of President Putin of Russia, Johnson decided he had no choice but to persuade them to turn on the taps.
The visit was a calculated risk given Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and accusations that Johnson was relying on “another murderous dictator to keep the lights on”. Three people were executed in Saudi Arabia on the day of the prime minister’s visit, in addition to the 81 men killed last weekend.
Johnson returned empty handed but defended his decision to try.
“The UK has a long-established relationship with Saudi Arabia,” he said. “We have no inhibitions around raising these subjects. But we are also talking about pragmatic things that are right for the world economy and the UK consumer.”
Advertisement
Johnson’s one-to-one meeting on Wednesday with MBS, who is persona non grata in the United States after American intelligence agencies found he approved the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was scheduled to last just 20 minutes. The meeting eventually ended after one hour and 45 minutes, prompting jokes among Johnson’s officials that the pair must have been playing table tennis, a favourite prime ministerial pastime.
It is understood MBS agreed to be as helpful as he could, but stressed that any immediate additional energy would be difficult. One official described the meeting as an “icebreaker” with little movement, if any, expected on increasing oil supply before the autumn.
Speaking on a flight between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, Johnson admitted that he did not know whether the supply chain will be transformed by the autumn, when UK domestic energy bills could hit £3,000 a year.
“We are taking a lot of steps to make sure we have something that relieves the pressure on UK consumers, so that their gas bills, the price of fuel, the cost of heating their home, will come down,” he said. “We’ve got to accelerate the drive for renewables and go twice as fast as we possibly can on wind. On nuclear, we need to think again on that and invest in small reactors as well as the bigger projects. We need to be doing solar and make better use of hydrocarbons and we need to make sure that we’ve got the rest of the world helping to move beyond the dependence on Putin’s oil and gas.”
Johnson said the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could be “terrible” for consumers and motorists, who are already experiencing record petrol prices and fuel bills.
Advertisement
He believes households will now have to accept higher costs as the price of taking on Putin, whose troops have been fighting a proxy war in eastern Ukraine for the past eight years.
“If you look at what went wrong in 2014 after he took Crimea, we simply reorganised. It was a horrific mistake. He [Putin] was able to keep pushing his ... hydrocarbons on European consumers, and that financed his war machine that he’s now using,” said Johnson. “The West is paying something like $700 million [£530 million] a day to Putin in oil and gas revenues. And he’s using that money to finance his barbaric aggression in Ukraine.”
Behind the scenes, western leaders are engaged in co-ordinated diplomatic efforts to bring the rest of the world onside, cajoling the few countries who have stayed neutral during the conflict to pick a side.
Johnson has so far taken the lead with the Gulf nations, while Biden has focused on China. America and Britain have agreed not to speak to Putin directly and are allowing Emmanuel Macron, the French president, to take the lead with Russia. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, is understood to be planning a visit to India to meet the prime minister, Narendra Modi, within the month.
In an unmistakeable nod to China, Johnson said: “As time goes on, and as the number of Russian atrocities mounts up, I think it becomes steadily more difficult and politically embarrassing for people either actively or passively to condone Putin’s invasion.”
Advertisement
After a bloody week that saw Russia indiscriminately bomb hospitals, residential apartment blocks and a theatre sheltering 1,000 terrified Ukrainians, Johnson said he had “never seen such a stark division between good and evil” as he charged the Russian president with “trying to crush a blameless, innocent civilian population”.
He said the “barbaric aggression ... harked back to the darkest days of the Second World War”.
On Friday President Biden and President Xi of China had a video call that lasted nearly two hours. Last week Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, that Beijing will “absolutely face consequences” if it helps Moscow evade western sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.
Johnson said the war in Ukraine marked a “turning point” for the world, adding: “I don’t think I have ever seen such a clear case of right and wrong. I’ve never seen such a stark division between good and evil as there is in this invasion. And it is clear that right is overwhelmingly on the side of the Ukrainians. That’s why their plight is obvious to the world and why I think that in the last three weeks people’s understanding of what is happening is changing.
“I think that some countries began by thinking Putin’s war machine will go through like a knife through butter. That Kyiv will fall soon and it will be tragic, but it will be speedily accomplished.
Advertisement
“They have now been disabused of that idea. I think for a lot of people this has been a psychological shock. This has been a terrible realisation for people who may be living in a fool’s paradise. There’s going to have to be a new way of looking at nations like Russia.”
The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have also tried to plot a neutral course between western allies and Moscow, their partner in Opec, the organisation of the petroleum exporting countries.
Johnson said: “Both the countries that I have visited are standing partners of the UK over many, many decades. We have historic relationships with those countries, whatever difficulties there may be.
“It was encouraging to see that in that crucial vote in the UN general assembly, they were among the 141 [countries] to vote against Russian actions in Ukraine. Both Saudi and the Emirates came through and in the end ... Putin only got five votes on his side. There has rarely been a vote like it.
“So it’s important for me to come out and just remind them of some of the intelligence we’ve got after we’ve seen what’s happening — so that they understand our perspective on Ukraine.”
The prime minister said he would be meeting Biden and other Nato leaders to discuss what more could be done to assist Ukraine at an “extremely significant” meeting in Brussels next week.
In a clear message to Putin, Johnson said Britain’s commitment to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an armed attack against one of Nato’s 30 members equates to an attack against them all, is “rock solid”. It means that should the Russian president extend his attacks into a neighbouring Nato state such as Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia, then the UK would be bound to go to war with Russia.
“The negative consequences of the extinction of Ukraine, by Putin’s war machine, are enormous,” he said. “The dominoes can fall that way and you can see the nightmare world in which the next moves by a dictator ... would be to attack the other non-Nato former members of the Soviet Union who are still independent and still look to the West, to test the Article 5 guarantees.”
Johnson is also concerned about the wider implications of the authoritarian Putin regime triumphing over the democratically elected Ukrainian government.
“You can see which way it will go,” he said. “And you can also see that the read-across that successful aggression in Ukraine would have in east Asia and across the world ... would seem to prove that might is right and that aggression pays. On the other hand if Putin fails in Ukraine, as I believe he will because I actually think he is already failing, then at least that catastrophe would have been averted.”
The prime minister praised President Zelensky of Ukraine as a “heroic war leader” for the way that he has “brought his people together” and “mobilised the world”.
Johnson said there had also been resistance overseas to sanctions, including taking action on Russian banks and expelling the country from the Swift international payments system. He said he had “no doubt that we will want to continue to go further in helping the Ukrainians with defensive military support of all kinds”.
However, the prime minister said he was “not going to anticipate any further [domestic] spending rounds” after his Tory party leadership rival Jeremy Hunt said Britain should increase defence spending to the same level as America. The UK spent 2.3 per cent of GDP on defence in 2021, according to Nato figures, compared to 3.5 per cent of GDP by America.
Since the invasion began more than four weeks ago, a close relationship has blossomed between Johnson and Zelensky. The prime minister said: “I like him very much. He’s an absolutely charming guy but he’s also proved to be an inspiration and a heroic war leader.”
Such is the bond, Johnson has not ruled out visiting Zelensky in Ukraine. Last week three European leaders made the perilous journey by rail from Poland to Kyiv to meet him as the capital came under Russian attack. “I have a very, very strong desire to support him in any way I can,” Johnson said. “Whether that would be a useful way of showing my support I don’t know but it is of huge, strategic, political, economic, moral importance for Putin to fail and Zelensky to succeed.”
Although Johnson said he hoped Kyiv will “never fall” he has already offered Zelensky and his family refuge in the UK. He said: “We discussed all this ages ago. One of the first things we said was ‘what would happen if things got really bad?’. I’ve got to tell you that Volodymyr [Zelensky] has always been clear, his duty is to the Ukrainian people; he’s going to stay there, he’s going to look after them. I have to say I admire him.”
Amid claims that Ukrainian troops have driven back Russian forces near the capital, the prime minister believes Putin has “grossly miscalculated”. Recalling his own visit to Ukraine when he was foreign secretary, Johnson said he could see the country has a “very proud nationalistic sense of its own identity”.
“That’s why — when the intelligence became so overwhelming that this was going to happen — I just kept saying to everybody that the Ukrainians will fight and I was convinced that they would,” he said. “So I’ve been amazed that Putin failed to see that and now everybody is saying, ‘you’ve got to find him an off ramp’.”
The prime minister said Putin has made a “fundamental category error”. “He [Putin] said to himself this is not really a [nation] – and boy has he been proved wrong. He has trodden on a rake in a massive way.”
Johnson is cautiously optimistic about the peace talks amid claims Moscow and Kyiv are “halfway there” in agreeing the issue of Ukraine’s demilitarisation. The development came after Zelensky said that Ukraine will not soon become a member of Nato, a key concession that Russia demanded. But he fears Nato membership is not really the pivotal issue and believes Putin continues to harbour imperial ambitions.
Although he looked tired, Johnson, 57, still appeared more relaxed than he was a month ago, when revelations of illicit gatherings held at Downing Street during lockdown threatened to bring down his premiership.
The only party the prime minister appeared focused on last week was the one being thrown for his wife Carrie, who turned 34 last Thursday. He cut short his trip to the Middle East to make it back in time to join the celebrations.
Asked whether he and his wife were planning to do their bit by taking in a Ukrainian refugee, Johnson quipped: “I don’t — [own] the homes I live in.” However, he did not rule out making the government’s grace-and-favour-homes available to those fleeing. “I am very happy for those that are responsible to look into it,” he said.
Reflecting on the offer made by more than 150,000 people to give homes to refugees under the government’s new sponsorship scheme, the prime minister added: “What the British public are doing I think is incredible. It is amazing and I think that it will be a great experience and that both the families that take them in and the evacuees themselves will benefit.”
