In remarks expressed by Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev last week, Mr Putin’s puppet, he said that the world had stumbled into a “new Cold War”. In many ways, the situation is much worse.

In an interview with the BBC, the secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), admitted: “We are losing the tools and the kind of logic that we had in force during the Cold War. Everything now is more unstructured.”

When asked what measures are being taken to improve the situation, the secretary-general of the world’s largest intergovernmental security organization replied: “We are making an effort to maintain the structure of the agreed pattern of behaviour, but if we lose that then there are no more rules to consider.”

The OSCE monitors the compliance of NATO states and Russia with the collection of Cold War-era treaties and mechanisms that govern military basing, deployments and exercises in Europe. However, last year, Moscow unilaterally withdrew from the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, a key diplomatic arrangement that the organisation helps to implement, citing NATO provocations.

The erosion of such long-standing agreements is making the potential for a serious conflict harder to foresee. It is more unpredictable than the Cold War and more difficult to look ahead and have a sense of what is needed.

Russia’s relationship with NATO has been steadily deteriorating since Putin came to power, thanks to a host of concerns in Moscow over issues such as the alliance’s expansion and fears in the West linked to the Kremlin’s growing belligerence.

The OSCE chief called for the West to go back to fundamentals in their dialogue with Russia. Unfortunately however, the current tensions do not bode well for rebuilding new safety measures.

Jos Edmond Zarb

Birkirkara