Efence Secretary Ben Wallace said 25,000 Russians had been killed in Ukraine since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, as he insisted that Russia’s war “fail”.
Speaking at the NATO summit in Madrid, Mr Wallace told LBC: “I would still say the Ukrainians are winning. They withdrew large sums of money from the Russian armed forces.
“Twenty-five thousand Russians, we think, died in the battle in the span of 112, 115 days. Russia has failed with all its main goals.
“It has now been reduced to a grinding advance – a few hundred meters every few days at great cost in one small part of eastern Ukraine along two or three axes. It is not a victory in anyone’s book. ”
It comes when Mr. Wallance has called for a “reality test” of Britain’s defense spending amid reports of a cabinet split over investment in the UK military.
It is said that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s the calls of Mr. Foreign Minister Wallace and Liz Truss are resisting increasing defense spending in response to Russia’s growing threat.
He maintained on Tuesday that the UK was far ahead of the NATO target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defense and rejected criticism that the government would miss a 2019 manifesto promise to cut defense spending by 0.5 per cent more than inflation to increase.
But Mr Wallace told Times Radio: “On the two per cent, we are still absolutely on target to get to the end of this spending review at two per cent or more than two per cent of the GDP of spending on defense.
“So I am happy with where we are now, I am happy until the middle of 2024.
“The question that I think is important is what happens in the middle of the decade.
“It was a timeline that we were prepared to take certain vulnerability risks, as Russia was not that dangerous.
“Now that that has changed, there needs to be a reality check with what Russia has done in Ukraine.”
Asked how much extra money he wants on Sky News, Mr. Wallace replied, “How much is a queue? All department heads will say they want more money.”
But he continued: “If Britain wants to maintain its leadership role after 2024, we will have to see bigger investments. We have spent 40 years taking a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, sometimes it’s important to invest.
“Russia is now very, very dangerous on the world stage, the world is less safe than it was two or three years ago and it does not look like much will change for the next decade. I think this is the moment in the middle of the decade to say we need to commit to increased funding. ”
Mr Wallace conceded that with inflation at a 40-year high of 9.1 per cent, the manifesto promise to grow defense spending by 0.5 per cent above that rate will not be met this year.
He said: “I think a No10 spokesperson said yesterday that this was unlikely given the significant changes in inflation.
“I have been in politics long enough to see that every government does not fulfill its manifesto 100 percent. We promised to try to do these things.
“If the economic situation has changed or things are harder to deliver than people thought … it does not mean to say it is not a pursuit. If inflation had not decreased this year, we would be on course to reach 0.5 percent. ”
Mr Johnson has insisted that the government will live up to its manifesto promise when working out defense spending over the course of Parliament by 2024 on average.