There is a greater risk of an accidental outbreak of conflict between the West and Russia than at any other time since the end of the Cold War, General Nick Carter, the head of the British armed forces, said on Saturday.
General Carter told Times Radio that there is a greater risk of tensions in the new era of the “multipolar world”, in which governments compete for different goals and agendas.
“I think we need to be careful that people do not accept that this belligerent nature of some of our policies has reached a position where escalation leads to a miscalculation,” he said in an interview on Sunday.
Tensions have risen in Eastern Europe in recent weeks after the European Union accused Belarus of boarding thousands of migrants to create a humanitarian crisis on the border with Poland, an EU member state, in a dispute that threatens to attract them. Russia and NATO.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that NATO’s unscheduled maneuvers in the Black Sea pose a serious challenge to Moscow and that Russia has nothing to do with the migration crisis between its ally, Belarus, and the European Union, according to Agerpres.
General Carter said authoritarian rivals are willing to use any tools at their disposal, such as migrants, rising gas prices, proxy forces or cyber attacks. “The character of the war has changed,” he said.
After the bipolar world of the Cold War and the unipolar world of US domination, diplomats are now facing a much more complex multipolar world, said General Carter, who added that “traditional diplomatic tools and mechanisms” during the Cold War are no longer in use. handy.
“Without these tools and mechanisms there is a greater risk that these escalations or this escalation will lead to a miscalculation. So I think this is the real challenge we have to face,” the British military chief insisted.
The United Kingdom announced on Friday that a small team of British soldiers had been deployed to explore providing “technical support” for Poland on the border with Belarus.
Also Friday, British Typhoon fighter jets escorted two strategic Russian Tupolev Tu-160 nuclear bombers from its area of interest, in cooperation with NATO partners, to monitor the planes as they flew over international airspace.
