World

Moscow slams UK’s Radakin: Exaggerates Russia’s losses to get more money for weapons

Moscow slammed as “lies” the statements by Britain's Chief of the Defense Staff Admiral Tony Radakin who said Russia had lost half of its combat effectiveness since invading Ukraine, and accused him of making exaggerated claims to secure more funding for weapons from his government.

Radakin had told a parliamentary hearing that the invasion was a “catastrophic failure for Russia,” and that the Russian military machine “has approximately fired last year over 10 million shells, and at best it can produce maybe 1 million shells a year. It has lost over 2,500 tanks and at best can replace those tanks at the rate of 200 tanks a year.”

The Russian Ministry of Defense said his statements were “aimed at securing funding for modern weapons that would replace obsolete equipment shipped to Kyiv,” according to state news agency TASS.

“British Admiral Radakin’s assessments about the armored vehicles lost by Russia, combined with claims that the Russian Armed Forces has lost ‘half of its combat capability’ are discouraging due to the sheer scale of the lies… The logic and goals of Admiral Radakin’s propagandist statements made in the British parliament are obvious: to wrestle money from the stagnant budget to procure new weapons for the army and replace the junk being shipped to Ukraine.”

The Russian ministry pointed to Britain’s own Defense Secretary Ben Wallace claiming that he said the UK’s own weapons stockpile were facing “total depletion.”

However, Wallace said last week in parliament in response to how “Ukraine [was] depleting [the UK’s] military stockpiles”: “Ukraine has woken everyone up to issues such as ammunition stocks.”

Wallace stressed that the UK had already started restocking a few months ago and that funding has been allocated to “commission effectively from supply chains and manufacturing plants, so that there is a long-term solution to the need and munition is rolling off production lines.”

He added: “We all have finite stocks, which is why we will use the cash in the fund to start commissioning, which we have already done.”

Meanwhile, the Russian ministry claimed that Western states were mainly concerned over how to convince their taxpayers that the military shipments to Kyiv “make any sense at all and were good for something.”

It added: “In the absence of any results from the Ukrainian army on the battlefield, and, as is becoming increasingly clear – even the chance for such results – one can only fantasize about the ‘loss of combat capability’ of the Russian army.”

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