Russia, US entering ‘new Cold War’
MOSCOW: Russia and the West have entered a new Cold War that could lead to growing confrontations across the globe, as President Vladimir Putin challenges American international hegemony.
That is the consensus among military and foreign policy experts in Moscow, who have warned that Russia and the West are headed for a standoff as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis.
‘‘If we talk about the last Cold War, we are currently somewhere between the erection of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile crisis,’’ said Lieutenant General Evgeny Buzhinsky, a former head of the Russian ministry of defence’s international treaties department and now head of a Moscow think tank.
’’In other words, teetering on the brink of war, but without the mechanisms to manage the confrontation.’’
The Russian foreign ministry accused the Obama administration at the weekend of attempting the ‘‘final destruction of relations with Russia’’.
Sergei Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister, said Moscow would retaliate in kind if the United States goes ahead with new sanctions against Russia in response to the bombing of Aleppo.
The Sunday Telegraph understands the Kremlin has already made a decision to cut off diplomacy at least until after the November 8 US elections, in the hope of striking up a more ‘‘sincere’’ relationship with President Barack Obama’s successor.
The move came after John Kerry, the US secretary of state, cancelled all co-ordination over Syria, saying Russia had ripped up months of diplomatic work. Officials in Moscow say the Americans themselves have frequently reneged on agreed commitments.
Putin made the extent of this new confrontation clear last week when he rebuked a Russian reporter who asked him why relations with Washington had collapsed because of Syria.
’’It is not because of Syria. This is about one nation’s attempt to enforce its decisions on the whole world,’’ he said.
Putin came near to a formal declaration of ‘‘Cold War’’ on October 3, when he cancelled a plutonium reprocessing deal over the US’s ‘‘unfriendly’’ policies.
‘‘Ripping it up showed how angry we are because it is related to nuclear security, and the conditions attached were a way of saying ‘go to hell’,’’ said Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of Russia’s council on foreign and defence policy.
Putin’s meeting with Germany’s Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, the French president, last week may suggest the Kremlin still wants to keep open some diplomatic channels with Western governments.
Russia’s goal, according to a number of military, diplomatic, and political sources in Moscow, is a grand bargain that would overturn what it sees as an unjust postCold War settlement. However, there is little consensus on what such a settlement should look like. Some of Moscow’s publicly stated demands, such as the roll back of Nato, are entirely unacceptable to the West.
Russian experts fear the nearcollapse of diplomacy has increased the dangers of a ‘‘hot’’ proxy war or even the nightmare scenario: direct Russian-Western warfare.
Potential flashpoints include the Baltic, where Nato and Russia have accused one another of troop builds, and eastern Ukraine, where Russia continues to supply and direct the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The most dangerous flashpoint is Syria. Bashar al-Assad, the Moscow-allied Syrian president, said last week the conflict was already turning into a US-Russian confrontation. - Telegraph Group