The three words Boris Johnson said when he heard Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine have been revealed.
Shortly after 4am local time on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and world leaders across the globe were stunned, including the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Fears about Russian President Putin’s intentions had been mounting but no one was really sure he would pull the trigger.
The warmonger appeared on Russian television to announce the beginning of what he called a “special military operation" and Mr Johnson was awoken in the middle of the night at 10 Downing Street with a call from one of his advisers who broke the news.
The British Prime Minister responded with an obscenity directed at Putin: "That f***ing c***", the Washington Post has revealed.
He told the publication: "I was disgusted by Putin. I was disgusted by what he was doing. I was nauseated by his language, by his lies, by his aggression, by his condescension toward Ukraine. I thought the whole thing was repellent, arrogant, chauvinistic, wrong."
Follow The Mirror's blog on the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine here
Mr Johnson previously said Putin threatened him with a missile strike in an "extraordinary" phone call in the run-up to the invasion. The then-prime minister claimed in a BBC documentary that Mr Putin told him it "would only take a minute".
He said the comment was made after he warned the war would be an "utter catastrophe".
He said in the documentary: "He threatened me at one point, and he said, 'Boris, I don't want to hurt you but, with a missile, it would only take a minute' or something like that. Jolly.
"But I think from the very relaxed tone that he was taking, the sort of air of detachment that he seemed to have, he was just playing along with my attempts to get him to negotiate."
It was on that call that Mr Johnson said, to the Washington Post, there was "something about" Putin's tone.
He continued: "The chatter had been building up on the intelligence for a long time, and it had reached a crescendo on the last couple of days before the invasion.
"We could tell… It’s a mixture of kind of incredulity really but also fatalism. There was just something about Putin’s tone the last time I’d talked to him… He’d already made up his mind."
In New York, where it was still the evening of February 23, an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, requested by Ukraine, was being held just as Putin was set to talk.
The secretary general, Antonio Guterres said: “If indeed an operation is being prepared, I have only one thing to say, from the bottom of my heart,” Guterres said.
“President Putin: stop your troops from attacking Ukraine. Give peace a chance. Too many people have already died.”
By the time it was the turn of the Russian representative, Vasily Nebenzya, to speak, Putin had spoken and the tanks had been ordered to cross.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, described the surreal moment when in the middle of the meeting people started looking at their phones and pointing.
She said: "I got a text message from the Ukrainian ambassador, who was on the other side of the room, and he told me the attack had started. I looked around the room, I saw everybody on their phones.
"The room was kind of stunned. I use the word ‘electrified’ sometimes, but that’s not right. The room was stunned."
