With diplomatic tensions and mysterious military activity ratcheting up, Putin’s Russia and the west are increasingly flexing their muscles. Are we on the brink of a new confrontation or did the era of danger and paranoia never really go away?
• Read Luke Harding on Russia’s spies, sleepers and hitmen
Tanks and troops invading a satellite state, tit-for-tat spy expulsions, high-risk military games of chicken involving nuclear bombers and interceptor jets, gas supply cut-offs, and angry diplomatic exchanges – if it sounds familiar, then it should. Newspaper headlines from Moscow to Washington and Sydney to Kiev all agree: the cold war is back.
Well, maybe. Escalating tensions between President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and western countries led by the US are certainly reminiscent of the bad old days in some significant respects. The cold war, a truly global stand-off of immense ideological, military and political import, began, roughly, in the late 1940s and continued until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, an event later deplored by Putin as the biggest tragedy of the 20th century.
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