The Armed Forces will be hit by £500 million worth of cuts, the Defence Secretary announced on Wednesday, hours after British Storm Shadow missiles were fired into Russia for the first time.

The dramatic escalation saw Ukraine fire the UK-made, precision-guided cruise missiles into the village of Marino, Kursk, where they are thought to have struck a strategically important military facility.

Despite Vladimir Putin’s recent warnings that the conflict in Ukraine could escalate to nuclear war, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, announced on Wednesday that he was scrapping six major programmes across the Armed Forces, including the Army’s main fleet of drones.

Writing for The Telegraph, Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, cautioned that the cuts would send a message to adversaries that the UK’s defences were weakening.

He said: “For our enemies to be deterred, they must know we intend no holes in our capabilities or at least we will soon be upgrading them. To tell the world we are scaling back our capabilities when our enemies are doing the opposite is pure folly.”