[ad_1]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday mocked the "intellectual abilities" of the British army chief for calling Russia a greater threat than the group of Islamic states.
"With regard to the remarks of the British Chief of Staff, we can not prevent anyone from showing his intellectual abilities," Lavrov said through an interpreter at a press conference in Portugal.
"I have already heard many such statements from the British Minister of Defense," he said. "We can not influence the UK government's decisions on who is responsible for managing their armed forces."
The atmosphere of Lavrov was a response from General Mark Carleton-Smith, British Army Chief, to the Daily Telegraph newspaper: "Russia today unquestionably represents a much greater threat to our national security that Islamic extremist threats such as "al-Qaeda and (IS)."
Carleton-Smith said that "Russia is engaged in a systematic effort to explore and exploit Western vulnerabilities, especially in some non-traditional areas of cyberwar, space and war diving ".
Lavrov, after a meeting with the President of Portugal, said that such criticisms were not "original".
He claimed that former US President Barack Obama had "placed Russia at the same level as the Ebola virus" in a speech delivered at the UN General Assembly.
This seemed to be a reference to a speech made on 24 September 2014 by Obama in which he spoke of the threat posed by Russia to "the post-war order", in particular through his actions in Ukraine, where an insurgency supported by Russia is taking place. He then referred to the efforts made by the United States to combat the Ebola outbreak, with no mention of Russia.
– tensions between the United Kingdom and Russia –
Relations between Russia and Britain hit historic lows this year after London accused Russian military intelligence of using a banned nerve agent to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his Yulia girl in the English city of Salisbury in March.
The incident caused a wave of diplomatic expulsions between Moscow and the West, as well as a tightening of US sanctions.
Carleton-Smith told the Daily Telegraph Saturday that after the IS battlefield defeats in Syria and Iraq, the Western alliance must focus on the threat posed by Russia, and this, through NATO.
"We can not be content with the threat of Russia or leave it unchallenged The most important conventional military response to Russia lies in the maintenance of the capabilities and the coherence of the NATO alliance" , did he declare.
It was the first interview of the former commander of the Special Forces since he became head of the British General Staff in June.
He made these comments after visiting British troops deployed in Estonia as part of a NATO tactical group designed to deter any aggression from neighboring Russia.
Critics of the British army chief, Sergei Lavrov, were asserted by the British army chief that Russia is "indisputably" a more serious threat than that of the group of Islamic states.
