RUSSIA has been blamed for hoax phone calls that tricked two senior cabinet ministers into thinking they were talking to the Ukrainian prime minister.

There are now fears that doctored clips of Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, and Priti Patel, the home secretary, could soon be released by Moscow in a bid to undermine the UK Government’s support for Ukraine.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The Russian state was responsible for the hoax telephone calls made to UK ministers last week. This is standard practice for Russian information operations, and disinformation is a tactic straight from the Kremlin playbook to try and distract from their illegal activities in Ukraine and the human rights abuses being committed there.”

He said the hoax calls were part of “a string of distraction stories and outright lies from the Kremlin, reflecting Putin’s desperation as he seeks to hide the scale of the conflict and Russia’s failures on the battlefield”.

A third targeting the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, did not go through.

Mr Wallace's call lasted ten minutes. He became suspicious that it wasn’t Denys Shmyhal on the line as the questions became “wilder and wilder”. 

“The man looked like the prime minister and sounded like him and had a Ukrainian flag in the background. He was clearly trying to dupe us,” he said.

The government has launched an investigation into how the calls got through to the ministers.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said:“There are myriad attempts by the Russian state and others, almost daily, to attempt similar things to bait cyberhacking or other methods, and the vast, vast majority are stopped,” he said.