LONDON, December 23. /TASS/. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has expressed an opinion that it is impossible to restart relations with Russia.
"What I’ve really changed my mind on was whether it is possible to reset with Russia. I really thought, as I think many foreign secretaries and prime ministers have thought before, that we could start again with Russia. That it’s a great country we fought with against fascism," he wrote to the British Spectator magazine.
"It was very, very disappointing that I was wrong," added Johnson who served as foreign secretary in 2016-2018 and has been holding the prime ministerial office since July 2019.
In late June, Johnson revealed that Russia is to blame for failure to improve relations between Moscow and London. As an example, he cited Skripal poisoning case to prove his point.
On March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Great Britain and later swapped for Russian intelligence officers, and his daughter Yulia suffered the effects of the so-called Novichok nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury. Claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a nerve agent allegedly developed in Russia, London rushed to accuse Moscow of being involved in the incident. The Russian side flatly rejected all of the United Kingdom’s accusations, saying that a program aimed at developing such a substance had existed neither in the Soviet Union nor in Russia. Britain’s military chemical laboratory at Porton Down failed to identify the origin of the substance that poisoned the Skripals.