Top general says ‘accidental’ war with Russia more likely than during Cold War

A top British general has warned that the West is more at risk of an accidental war with Russia today than during the Cold War.

General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the defence staff told Times Radio, that: “We’re in a much more competitive world than we were even ten or 15 years ago, and I think the nature of the competition between states and great powers leads to greater tensions.

“We have to be careful that people don’t end up allowing the bellicose nature of some of our politics to end up in a position where escalation leads to miscalculation,” he explained.

He went on: “Many of the traditional diplomatic tools and mechanisms that you and I grew up with in the Cold War, these are no longer there, and without those, there is a greater risk.”

The Cold War refers to the state of hostility that existed between the Soviet bloc countries and Western powers from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the USSR in 1990. The period was characterised by periods of heightened and cooled tensions respectively, however there were several notable nuclear close calls.

He implied that the global situation was more precarious today than during the Cold War, as there are more major powers than just the US and Russia involved.

Yesterday the United States government said Russia may be planning an invasion of Ukraine in a potential repeat of its 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Tens of thousands of Russian troops have amassed on Ukraine’s eastern border.

This comes after Polish prime minister Mteusz Morawiecki and various western leaders accused Belarus’s authoritarian leader, backed by Russian premier Vladimir Putin, of sending migrants to the Polish border due to fury over EU sanctions on the Lukashenko regime.

In a statement yesterday afternoon, the Ministry of Defence has said a small team of British soldiers have been deployed to Poland amid the ongoing crisis on its border with Belarus.

The Kremlin alleged on Thursday that it had attempted to intercept a British spy plane in the Black Sea to Ukraine’s south.