The US intelligence chief has warned that tensions between the United States and Russia are spiraling into a new Cold War.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Tuesday that the Russians remained committed to an “assertive foreign policy,” including efforts to hamper “Ukraine’s attempts to integrate with Western institutions.”
“They’re greatly concerned about being contained,” Clapper said in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“Events in Ukraine raised Moscow’s perceived stakes for increasing its presence in the region to prevent future regime change in the former Soviet republics and for accelerating a shift to a multi-polar world in which Russia is the uncontested regional hegemon in Eurasia,” the spy master added.
Clapper said that Russia was increasingly “paranoid” about NATO’s installation of a missile system in Europe.
“So, a lot of these aggressive things that the Russians are doing, for a number of reasons — great power status, to create the image of being co-equal with the United States etc — I think could probably… go on, and we could be into another Cold War-like spiral here,” he added.