It’d be better if he did stay on holidays

“ Allies of UK defence secretary Ben Wallace sought to clarify the minister’s controversial Munich comments on Sunday afternoon.

They emphasised that the comparison to the failed appeasement of 1938 was intended to apply only if Russia ’s president Putin was negotiating in bad faith and always planned to invade Ukraine .

Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko on Sunday morning complainedthat the alarms being sounded by the West risked playing into Putin’s hands.

“It’s not the best time for us to offend our partners in the world, reminding them of this act which actually not bought peace but the opposite, it bought war,” the diplomat told the BBC.

It comes after Wallace told the Sunday Times: “It may be that he [Putin] just switches off his tanks and we all go home but there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the west.”