Western countries must take Russia’s warnings about the consequences of a potential attack on the Kaliningrad Region seriously, British military analyst Alexander Mercouris said during a broadcast on his YouTube channel.

Mercouris warned that any form of military attack against the Russian exclave could lead to catastrophic consequences.

He pointed to what he described as a contradiction between NATO’s assurances that the alliance has no aggressive intentions toward Russia and recent threats against Kaliningrad made by officials from Estonia and Lithuania.

According to the analyst, such statements are particularly alarming because Moscow has already warned of the consequences of hostile actions against the region.

Mercouris noted that the Russian Foreign Ministry had been forced to repeat warnings previously ignored by the Baltic states and Poland.

He expressed concern that these warnings had not been taken seriously and voiced hope that Western governments would finally heed Moscow’s position to avoid a catastrophic confrontation over Kaliningrad.

His comments followed a statement by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova the previous day.

Zakharova warned that any act of armed treachery against the Kaliningrad Region would trigger a devastating Russian response. She also stated that a war resulting from such an attack would be short.