RUSSIA ‘FLEXING ITS MUSCLES IN OUR BACKYARD’
Army chief: Britain must confront Moscow threat
RUSSIA is “flexing its muscles in our own backyard”, the UK’s Armed Forces chief has warned.
Our military is on a “campaigning posture” to confront threats from Moscow, the Chief of the Defence Staff told the Royal United Services Institute think tank yesterday.
General Sir Nick Carter said Britain would respond to mounting Kremlin aggression with warplanes and naval ships and warned security experts that Vladimir Putin’s forces pose the “most serious” threat “in the EuroAtlantic area”. He said: “The
Russian regime’s increasingly assertive activity is almost certainly influenced by problems at home.” Earlier this month 10 Russian warships and aircraft assembled “in a show of force in the waters off the British and Irish coasts”. Gen Sir Nick ( left) said it shows “an ostentation they’ve not displayed since the Cold War”. Deterring such threats “requires conventional hard power – warships and aircraft – and less conventional capabilities like cyber”. He added: “It requires us to hold their backyard at risk.”
Britain is “constantly improving the readiness of our Armed Forces to operate alongside allies”, he said.
Despite Russian cyber attacks, he stressed: “The nature of war does not change – it is always about violence, guts, people.”
He said a smear campaign branding the Oxford-AstraZeneca jabs a “monkey vaccine” that turns people into apes was “for economic and reputational purposes”.