- The international order will be destroyed if Russia gets away with its war against Ukraine, US General Mark Milley told CNN.
- “If Russia gets away with it for free, then so does the so-called international order,” Milley said.
- Milley added: “If that happens then we are entering an era of seriously increased instability.”
Loading Something is loading.
The entire international order will be destroyed if Russian President Vladimir Putin gets away with his unprovoked war on Ukraine “for nothing,” US top general Mark Milley said on Tuesday.
“If this continues, if there is no response to this aggression, if Russia gets away with it for free, then so does the so-called international order,” Milley said in an interview with CNN.
Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, continued: “And when that happens, we’re entering an era of seriously heightened instability.”
The general also said during the interview that “much more is at stake” in the Russian invasion than Ukraine – which has already claimed thousands of lives and forced millions to flee.
“What is at stake is the security of Europe,” Milley said, adding that Russia’s invasion “is the greatest challenge to Europe’s security since the end of World War II.”
“And indeed, you can easily argue that it’s about the global international security order that was established in 1945,” Milley told CNN at Ramstein Air Base in Germany after a meeting co-hosted by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin allied countries.
Milley said the post-war world order “prevented a great power war, and underscoring the whole concept is the idea that big nations will not engage in military aggression against smaller nations, and that’s what happened here, unprovoked military aggression by Russia against a smaller nation.”
Although no superpowers have been directly at war since World War II, world powers such as the United States and the former Soviet Union fought many smaller nations, including Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent decades, the US and Russia have exchanged views in proxy battles in the developing world.
Before the start of the Russian war, Andrew Lohsen, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Insider’s John Haltiwanger and Ryan Pickrell that while the US and its allies are unlikely to fight for Ukraine, an invasion could be “an era of… more open confrontation” between Russia and the NATO countries.
“We’re entering a time where conflict could likely be more frequent or deadly because we no longer have agreed-upon rules of acceptable behavior,” Lohsen said. “This takes us back to an era of expansionist conflict and basically turns the clock back.”
Putin started Russia’s war against Ukraine on February 24, and since then Russian forces have surrounded and shelled several cities in the eastern European country, hitting several civilian targets, including hospitals, schools and train stations.
“Now is the time and right now is the opportunity to stop the aggression and restore peace and security to the European continent,” Milley told CNN.
The US and its NATO allies have rallied behind Ukraine and imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia in response to its invasion. In addition, Western leaders have condemned Russia, accusing it of committing war crimes in Ukraine.