Germany will not sack the senior air force officer who inadvertently leaked military secrets to Russia by dialling into a secure phone call from the wi-fi of a Singapore hotel.

Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, said the classified conversation about the Taurus missile was the result of an “individual error” and communication systems had not been breached.

In the call, which was published on Russian propaganda sites last week, German officials discuss Olaf Scholz’s reluctance to send Taurus missiles to Kyiv and the presence of British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine.

The leak has caused dismay in the West and been gleefully celebrated by the Kremlin.

One of the participants in the call dialled in from a hotel room in Singapore where he was visiting an airshow, Mr Pistorius said. The meeting was held on Webex, a popular public platform for audio and video meetings.

Mr Pistorius said that the “trust of allies in Germany remains unbroken”.

“Everyone knows about the danger of such wiretapping attacks and knows that no one can offer 100 per cent protection,” he said.

‘I will not sacrifice my best officers’

He added that he was unlikely to sack the officer responsible unless more wrongdoing was discovered in a security review. “If something worse does not come out, I will certainly not sacrifice my best officers for Putin’s games,” he said.

He went on to suggest that Russia routinely tries to bug insecure communications networks at hotels where they believe top German officials will be receiving sensitive phone calls.

“For the Russian secret services, it was a real find… targeted hacking took place in the hotels used across the board,” he said. “It must therefore be assumed that the access to this conference was a chance hit as part of a broad, scattered approach.”

The conversation also casts doubt on the reasons the German chancellor has publicly given for refusing to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

Mr Scholz has argued that Germany could not justify matching British and French moves in sending long-range missiles to Ukraine and supporting their deployment.

But according to the leaked recording, there is no reason why Taurus missiles could not be operated without any direct help from German soldiers.

On Tuesday Maria Zakharova, the spokesman for Russia’s foreign ministry, described the German officers on the call as “inglorious b-----ds” for discussing possible strikes on the Kerch bridge linking Russia to Crimea.

The Kremlin said the call was proof Germany was going to carry out strikes inside Russia, a claim swiftly denied by Berlin.

“The recording itself suggests that the Bundeswehr is discussing substantively and specifically plans to strike Russian territory,” said spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a senior MP from the opposition party CDU, warned on Tuesday that Mr Scholz “has increasingly become a security risk for Europe” in light of the embarrassing audio leak and his own remarks about the Taurus system.

The CDU also called for an emergency meeting of the Bundestag’s defence committee to discuss the leaked audio recordings. Henning Otte, a CDU MP, said the leak “once again shows the need to set up a national security council with a coordinating function and decision-making powers”.

Last week, Mr Scholz came under intense criticism after he appeared to confirm that British soldiers have been deployed to Ukraine to support Kyiv’s forces. He disclosed the information while attempting to outline his own grounds for refusing deliveries of the powerful Taurus missiles to Ukraine.