Sharjah24 – AFP: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson calls for the West to end its "addiction" to Russian energy, which he says allows President Vladimir Putin to "blackmail" the world.

Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister said, "We've got a global crisis in which it's obvious that the Russian aggression in Ukraine has helped to trigger a spike in the price of hydrocarbons, a spike in the price of oil, and it is vital if we're going to stand up to Putin's bullying, if we're going to avoid being blackmailed by Putin in the way that so many Western countries sadly have been, we've got to get ourselves off Russian hydrocarbons."

The British Prime Minister added, "Vladimir Putin over the last years has been like a pusher feeding an addiction in Western countries to his hydrocarbons, to his oil and gas. We need to get ourselves off that addiction."

He continued, "Listen to what all the other European countries are now saying. Three weeks ago they wouldn't have said that was possible. A month ago before the invasion everybody was saying 'oh no, we'll never be able to do it'. Now after what Putin has done in Ukraine you're seeing European colleagues step up to the plate and say 'right, this is the time we've got to learn our lesson as the West, we've got to end that dependency on Russian hydrocarbons' and that's one of the reasons I'm going out to the Gulf."

Concluding his statement,  Boris Johnson has further stated,"It's very important when you've got quite delicate discussions going on, negotiations going on in Tehran about some of our most difficult consular cases particularly Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, that you know we should say as little as possible until, unless and until the thing is actually concluded. Everybody wants Nazanin home, we've been working on that for a long long time. I do not want to do anything to interrupt the conversations right now."