Johnson: Negotiating with Putin Like Dealing with ‘Crocodile’

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated that Ukraine and Russia cannot reach a negotiating agreement cause talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin is like dealing with a "crocodile."

"I really don't see how the Ukrainians can easily sit down and come to some kind of accommodation. How can you negotiate with a crocodile when it's got your leg in its jaws?" Johnson said on a flight to India, The Guardian reported.

"I think it's very hard to see how the Ukrainians can negotiate with Putin now, given his manifest lack of good faith and his strategy, which is evident, which is to try to engulf and capture as much of Ukraine as he can and then perhaps to have some kind of negotiation from a position of strength or even to launch another assault on Kyiv," Johnson added.

In the same vein, he affirmed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had taken a "pretty maximalist position" on the war in the Donbas with ambitions to expel all Russian troops in Donetsk and Luhansk.

"But on Crimea, they are not as maximalist," he said, referring to the Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia in 2014.

Last Saturday, Russia banned the Prime Minister from entering the country “in view of the unprecedented hostile action by the British Government, in particular the imposition of sanctions against senior Russian officials,” the Russian Foreign Ministry announced in a statement.