There aren’t many places in the world where former prime minister Boris Johnson can still get a hero’s welcome, but for all his cockups on the foreign policy front, he is still a firm friend of Ukraine. When war began in 2022, he established solidarity with the country and a close relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has been a continuously vocal critic of Vladimir Putin since and – regardless of whether he exploited the conflict in the final months of his premiership to distract from domestic affairs and ramping unpopularity – his reputation in that country remains that of a great international ally.
But make no mistake: in his new Channel 5 documentary, Into Ukraine’s Kill Zone, Johnson does not want to be received as a statesman, but a journalist. As he joins Daily Mail war reporters and Ukrainian soldiers on a trip from Kyiv to the eastern occupied frontline, that means balaclavas and bullet-proof vests and hiding his name to avoid attention – and peril.
It means high-speed charges along the country’s most dangerous and bombarded road, it means eating one of his colleagues’ Snickers bars and it means marvelling “You shot the arse off that one!” after observing the scale of a drone’s destruction. It also means decrying the West’s increasing indifference and saying it “has got to snap out of its complacency”, now that he is free of responsibility and the burden of diplomacy.
