The chief of the UK’s armed forces has said Britain must be ready for armed conflict with Russia over worsening tensions in eastern Europe.

General Sir Nick Carter said Russia was now a greater threat in the region than it has been in nearly a decade amid claims that Moscow had amassed nearly 100,000 soldiers along the border with Ukraine.

The Kremlin butted heads with the British government this weekend over the spiralling migrant crisis on the border between Poland, a Nato member, and Belarus, a close ally of Russia.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss urged President Vladimir Putin to intervene in the ‘shameful manufactured migrant crisis’ after EU officials accused Belarus of stoking the crisis in revenge for economic sanctions.

Belarusian soldiers are said to have been seen cutting Polish border fences and pushing migrants into Poland, with footage showing them herding large groups of people through forests toward the frontier.

Meanwhile, opposition MPs and journalists in Belarus have accused their government of relaxing visa restrictions to encourage thousands of people to fly in from Iraq, Syria and other countries with the help of Russia’s state airline, Aeroflot.

Busloads of migrants have reportedly been driven by state officials from the capital of Minsk to the border for bogus ‘tourist’ trips.

Gen Sir Carter said he doesn’t think Russia wants a ‘hot war’ but ‘regards the global strategic context as a continuous struggle in which, I think, they would apply all the instruments of national power to achieve their objectives.’

He told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday: ‘The question, of course, is how you define war and I, as a soldier, would tend to define war as the actual act of combat and fighting, and I don’t think they want that.

‘I think they want to try and achieve their objective in rather more nuanced ways.’

Asked on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show whether the situation could escalate into armed conflict, he said:  ‘I don’t know. I think we have to be on our guard and make sure deterrence prevails and critically we have to make sure there is unity in the Nato alliance and we don’t allow any gaps to occur in our collective position.

He said it was most likely the situations in Belarus and Ukraine were probably a ‘classic distraction’ of the type Russia has been using ‘for years and years’.

The Kremlin, he added, uses a ‘hybrid playbook where you link disinformation to destabilisation and the idea of pushing migrants on to the European Union’s borders is a classic example of that sort of thing’.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Ms Truss accused Belarus’ dictator president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, of using ‘desperate migrants as pawns’ in a ‘carefully crafted crisis’.

Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denied the Kremlin had any responsibility for the crisis despite its support for Belarus, arguing the guilt lies with Britain over the Iraq war.

She said: ‘Britain bears a clear historical responsibility for everything that has happened in the region since – the deaths of Iraqis, the destruction of Iraqi statehood, the endless flows of refugees, the emergence of ISIS, the humanitarian disasters in this part of the world.

‘Until London is held accountable for its crimes, its representatives have no right to point the finger at anyone.’

Belarus has denied encouraging illegal migration and accused Polish forces of breaking international law by pushing migrants back into Belarus.

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