{"id":245633,"date":"2021-11-15T12:08:33","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T12:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=245633"},"modified":"2021-11-16T08:12:17","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T08:12:17","slug":"uk-must-be-ready-for-war-with-russia-says-armed-forces-chief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=245633","title":{"rendered":"UK must be ready for war with Russia, says armed forces chief"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rowena Mason \u2013 The Guardian Nov 14, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The outgoing head of the UK\u2019s armed forces has said the military will have to be ready for war with Russia after recent tensions in eastern Europe<\/a>, but he does not believe Vladimir Putin really wants \u201chot war\u201d with the west.<\/p>\n

Gen Sir Nick Carter said Russia<\/a> was now a greater threat in eastern Europe than it was when he started in the role eight years ago, as he gave a series of interviews before his departure as chief of the defence staff at the end of the month.<\/p>\n

He said he \u201cdistinctly hoped\u201d there would not be a war with Russia and he did not believe the country wanted a physical war, but Nato<\/a> would have to be ready.<\/p>\n

He spoke amid tensions on the border between Poland and Russia\u2019s ally Belarus<\/a> over refugees stranded in camps, as well as signs that Russian troops could be massing along the border with Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Liz Truss, the UK foreign secretary, this weekend urged Putin to intervene in the \u201cshameful manufactured migrant crisis\u201d unfolding at the border. Western nations have accused Belarus of attracting people wanting to come to the EU to the border, while Poland<\/a> has been rebuffing their efforts to enter.<\/p>\n

The former MI6 officer Christopher Steele has said he believes Moscow thinks it is at war<\/a> with the UK and its allies.<\/p>\n

Asked about this view on Sky News\u2019s Trevor Phillips on Sunday, Carter said: \u201cRussia probably regards the global strategic context as a continuous struggle in which, I think, they would apply all the instruments of national power to achieve their objectives. But in so doing, [the Russians] don\u2019t want to bring on a hot war.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, yes, in a way I think he\u2019s right. The question, of course, is how you define war and I, as a soldier, would tend to define war as the actual act of combat and fighting, and I don\u2019t think they want that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they want to try and achieve their objective in rather more nuanced ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

He later told BBC One\u2019s The Andrew Marr Show that Russia was in a \u201chybrid playbook where you link disinformation to destabilisation and the idea of pushing migrants on to the European Union\u2019s borders is a classic example of that sort of thing\u201d.<\/p>\n

He said it was most likely that the Belarus and Ukraine border situations were \u201cclassic distraction\u201d by the Russian government of the type that had been going on \u201cfor years and years and years\u201d.<\/p>\n

Asked whether it could turn into a shooting war, Carter said: \u201cI don\u2019t know. I think we have to be on our guard and make sure deterrence prevails and critically we have to make sure there is unity in the Nato alliance and we don\u2019t allow any gaps to occur in our collective position.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carter also acknowledged that the situation in Afghanistan was \u201cnot good\u201d, after arguing at the time of the Taliban takeover in August that the group had changed and should be \u201cgiven space\u201d to form a government.<\/p>\n

He said there had been \u201cghastly images \u2026 of a potential humanitarian crisis\u201d and admitted the Taliban had \u201ca lot of things that had got to change\u201d. But he still insisted the Taliban were different from how they were in 2001 and claimed \u201cthe moderate lot are probably privately arguing to be a different sort of Taliban\u201d.<\/p>\n

Adm Sir Tony Radakin, 55, the head of the navy, is taking over as head of the armed forces, with Carter due to stand down at the end of the month.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The outgoing head of the British armed forces says that the risk of war with Russia is now greater than at any time since WWII<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-russia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=245633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":245634,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245633\/revisions\/245634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=245633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=245633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=245633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}