UK diplomacy 'worthless': Russian UN official

A senior Russian official at the United Nations on Wednesday slammed British diplomacy, just hours before Boris Johnson speaks to Vladimir Putin to try to defuse the Ukraine crisis.

"There is always room for diplomacy, but frankly, we don't trust British diplomacy," Dmitry Polyanskiy, deputy ambassador to the UN told Sky News in an interview.

"I think in recent years British diplomacy has shown that it is absolutely worthless," he added.

"I really don't want to offend anybody, especially my good friends, British diplomats, but really, the results are nothing to boast about."

Britain's prime minister visited Kyiv on Tuesday, warning that Russian forces massed on the border represented a "clear and present danger" to Ukraine.

Johnson was on Wednesday to talk to Putin in a delayed phone call to cool fears about the Kremlin's intent.

But Polyanskiy's comments, although not unsurprising given both countries have been at loggerheads for years, indicated that a breakthrough looked unpromising.

Tensions between London and Moscow reached their peak in 2018 when former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury, southern England.

Britain blamed Russia for the attempted murder with the weapons-grade chemical agent Novichok, and expelled dozens of Russian diplomats.

Polyanskiy said the West was exaggerating the number of Russian forces at the Ukraine border. 

"Now it's already 130,000," he told Sky News. "I see that inflation is very high these days, it was 100,000 yesterday.

"I don't know where they take these figures from and we have absolutely no trust in the intelligence data from the US and from the UK.

"I think this is the same intelligence that claims that Saddam Hussein possesses the weapons of mass destruction," he added. 

"The hysteria doesn't stop, it's absolutely happening in the heads of Western politicians and not really on the ground."

Putin on Tuesday accused the West of ignoring Moscow's security concerns and of using Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia, though he said he hoped a solution could be found to end spiralling tensions.

Putin said the Kremlin was studying a response from Washington and NATO to Moscow's security demands, but that it had been far from adequate.