Outgoing UK Chief of Defense Staff describes Russia as most acute threat

Outgoing UK Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Nick Carter said that from his point of view Russia poses the most acute threat to the UK national security.

"I became head of the Army in the summer of 2014, and we were arguing at that stage as to whether the threat was from violent extremism or whether it was a state threat from Russia. At that stage, the violent extremism argument just about won. But then, in 2018, we had the attack on the Skripal family in Salisbury, and it became blindingly obvious that Russia was the most acute threat to our country," Carter told The Telegraph.

 

He stressed that the threats related to Russia and China were not conventional.

"The way threats appear today are not so much as a conventional threat; rather it is what I call grey-zone activity, where opponents see the world as a continuous struggle in which all the instruments of power can be used, so long as they do not bring on a hot war," Carter added.

Former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in March 2018 in the UK city of Salisbury. The United Kingdom believes that Russia played a role in what it calls a murder attempt, an allegation Moscow has denied. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that there was no evidence incriminating Moscow.