Tensions between the two superpowers reached Cold War heights during the Ukraine conflict, the director has said

There was a point in the last three years of the Ukraine conflict where Russia and the US have teetered on the edge of a nuclear war, acclaimed filmmaker Oliver Stone has said.

Speaking to Russian students at the 'Knowledge.First' event in Moscow on Tuesday, spoke out against the US role in the Ukraine conflict, as well as its coverage in Western media.

The Hollywood legend suggested that over the past three years, Moscow and Washington have relived the Cold War spike in tensions that previously culminated in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and said he hoped a corresponding wind down would follow. The US and the Soviet Union almost came to a nuclear clash at the height of the Cold War, after the USSR retaliated by placing nuclear weapons in Cuba, following Washington's deployment of nukes in Turkey.

"I want to emphasize to you students how very close we came to World War III because of this awful leadership," he said.

"We bring a great waste of our resources and height of this futility was a war which [former US President Joe] Biden recently dedicated to weakening Russia," Stone said. "It is a retrograde war."

Western media coverage of the conflict and Russia has shocked him during the past three years, the director admitted.

"Even at the height of the Cold War, we didn't treat Russia like this," he said. Whereas now, the media has trained people in the West to equate Russia with President Vladimir Putin, Stone added.

"The propaganda state in the West is an incredible empire. Far further and stronger than I ever imagined. You are unable to see the inside of the matrix," he said.

While the anti-war filmmaker has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, he has criticized Biden and the US "neoconservative movement" for the Ukraine conflict. Stone produced the 2016 'Ukraine on Fire' documentary showing the role Washington played in the 2014 Maidan coup that overthrew Kiev's democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovich.

(RT.com)