The defence ministry tweeted: "To detract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defence is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale."

Russia's defence ministry alleged that the same group of British military specialists helped plan a drone attack Saturday on ships in Moscow-annexed Crimea and were involved in a "terrorist attack" on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines on September 26.

The British defence ministry said that this "invented story says more about arguments going on inside the Russian Government than it does about the West".