US has ‘real concerns’ over border build-up
mistake” by invading Ukraine as Russia kept tens of thousands of troops near the border the two countries share.
Experts have warned that the troop build-up is not routine as it is taking place largely at night, in secret and out of the usual cycle of Russian manoeuvres.
Mr Blinken said: “Based on the past, we have real concerns about what we’re seeing in the present, and it would be a serious mistake for Russia to engage in a repeat of what it did in 2014.”
Britain’s most senior military officer said that there was now an even “greater risk” of accidental war with Russia than there was at any stage of the Cold War.
General Sir Nick Carter, chief of the defence staff, told Times Radio that many of the traditional diplomatic mechanisms that existed decades ago with Russia were no longer in place, meaning the threat of “escalation leading to miscalculation” was a “real challenge”. Two US warships – the USS Porter, a destroyer armed with Tomahawk missiles, and the command ship USS Mount Whitney – arrived at the Black Sea port of Batumi, Georgia this week.
Yesterday, the Russian military said it was tracking US naval ships in the Black Sea and accused Washington of studying the region as a potential theatre of war. Russia “views the aggressive military activity of the US in the Black Sea region as something that poses a threat to regional security and strategic stability”, said Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister.
Moscow said it had detected six flights by Nato spy planes in airspace over the Black Sea, part of what it described as intensifying air reconnaissance by Western military.
The EU yesterday welcomed Turkey’s announcement of a ban on Syrian, Yemeni and Iraqi citizens flying to Minsk, the capital of Belarus. EU officials have been pushing several countries to block migrants from the Middle East boarding flights to Belarus, which they claim is luring thousands in order to engineer a humanitarian crisis on the border.
Thousands of migrants have settled in camps in the woods by the Polish border, which they are blocked from crossing. Several have reportedly died as temperatures sink to freezing.