West at risk of conflict with Russia: UK army chief

There is a greater risk of an accidental war breaking out between the West and Russia than at any time since the Cold War, with many of the traditional diplomatic tools no longer available, Britain's most senior military officer said.

General Nick Carter, chief of the defence staff, told Times Radio there was a greater risk of tensions in the new era of a "multipolar world", where governments compete for different objectives and different agendas.

"I think 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 said in an interview to be broadcast today.

Tensions have been mounting in eastern Europe in recent weeks after the European Union accused Belarus of flying in thousands of migrants to engineer a humanitarian crisis on its border with EU-member state Poland, a dispute that threatens to draw in Russia and Nato.

President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that unscheduled Nato drills in the Black Sea posed a serious challenge for Moscow and that Russia had nothing to do with the crisis on close ally Belarus's border with the bloc.

"The United States and its allies in Nato are carrying out unplanned exercises in the Black Sea. Not only is a rather powerful naval group involved in these exercises, but also aviation, including strategic aviation. This is a serious challenge for us," Putin said in an interview.

Carter said authoritarian rivals were willing to use any tool at their disposal, such as migrants, surging gas prices, proxy forces or cyber attacks. "The character of warfare has changed," he said.

Following the bi-polar world of the Cold War, and the unipolar world of US dominance, diplomats now face a more complex multi-polar world, he said, adding that "traditional diplomatic tools and mechanisms" of the Cold War were no longer available.