Russia and the West have entered a new Cold War that could lead to growing confrontations across the globe, as Vladimir Putin challenges American international hegemony.

That is the consensus among military and foreign policy experts in Moscow, who have warned that Russia and the West are headed for a standoff as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis.

“If we talk about the last Cold War, we are currently somewhere between the erection of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile crisis,” said Lt Gen Evgeny Buzhinsky, a former head of the Russian ministry of defence’s international treaties department and now head of the PIR centre, a Moscow think tank.

“In other words, teetering on the brink of war, but without the mechanisms to manage the confrontation.”