A former senior director for Europe and Russia at the US National Security Council has warned that “People shouldn’t delude themselves” because the world is “already in the middle of World War 3.”

Fiona Hill has warned that the Russian President Vladimir Putin will not stop at Ukraine and the “world should be paying close attention.”

Hill said, “Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force.

“Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.”

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She added how we are “already in the middle of World War 3 whether the world knows it or not” and we have been for “some time.”

Hill continued, “We’re already in it. We have been for some time.

“We keep thinking of World War 1, World War 2 as these huge great big set pieces, but World War 2 was a consequence of World War 1.

“And we had an interwar period between them.

“And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War.”

The expert added: “Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War 1.

“At the end of World War 2, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period.

“We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.

“All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts.

“We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014.

“People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something.

“We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.”

The world must stop Putin’s war in Ukraine as this “could be a prologue to a greater European or even global massacre,” top Ukrainian aide to the President’s office has warned.

Head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak said that for many years the “West listened to Mr Putin but didn’t hear him.”

He warned that it is only now the world are now finally “waking up to the existential challenge” that the Russian President “poses to the world order.”