Former UK spy chief warns Putin ‘is more comfortable than he should be’

Sir Richard Moore the former UK’s MI6 spy chief has told Sky News that he finds the tens of thousands of Russian troops killed in Ukraine just in December 2025, “astonishing.”

Vladimir Putin has lost more troops in Ukraine during fighting in December 2025 than Moscow lost during the ten-year Soviet-Afghan war.

The Soviet-Afghan war started in 1979 until 1989 and around 20,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.

The Russia President Mikhail Gorbachev called the war a “bleeding wound” and was viewed as a “humiliating mistake.”

Putin has made the same mistake as Gorbachev made in 1979, as he believed the Afghan war would be a “quick operation,” as Moscow wanted to takeover Afghanistan.

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In many years from now, I wonder what historians will call Putin’s so-called Special Military Operation which has seen more than 1.2million Russian soldiers either killed or severely wounded in less than four years.

The former MI6 spy chief told Sky News’s on the World podcast, “The losses are terrible, and even the Russians will struggle to replace that level of losses. So, they continue to do appallingly badly on the battlefield.”

Moore said that despite the “astonishing” battlefield losses, Putin “is more comfortable than he should be.”

Moore added, “We should be adding more pressure. We should be helping the Ukrainians more extensively than we are.

“We should be giving them more permissions than we are at the moment.”

Last month the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has revealed to delegates at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland how many Russians were killed in December.

Rutte revealed during a panel discussion at the WEF that Russia lost around 1,000 troops every day in Ukraine, the NATO chief made it quite clear, they are not wounded, they have been killed in action.

Rutte told delegates, “And yes, it is true, the Russians have lost in December 1,000 people dead—not seriously wounded, dead—a day.

“That’s over 30,000 in the month of December. In the 1980s in Afghanistan, the Soviets lost 20,000 in 10 years.

“Now they (Russia – ed.) lose 30,000 in one month.”