The UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for the deescalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict as it would be “catastrophic” if the war breaks out.

Mr Guterres, addressing world leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, said he still believes the war “war will not happen.”

He said it was time to deescalate the crisis amid an intense spike in shelling in eastern Ukraine by opposing sides, and a concentration of Russian troops around the country’s borders.

“There is no alternative to diplomacy,” the UN chief said, adding that “all issues, including the most intractable, must be addressed through diplomatic frameworks”.

Quoting from the United Nations Charter, which Guterres defended as a fundamental pillar of international law, he said that all nations “shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means, in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered”.

All parties should be “extremely careful with their rhetoric”, the secretary-general continued, after noting that the threat to global security today “is more complex and probably higher” than during the Cold War.

During that era, Mr Guterres explained that safeguards and safety checks existed to allow nations to prevent crises by using “back-channels”.

Today however, “many of those systems no longer exist and most of the people trained to use them are no longer here”, he insisted, while “miscommunication or miscalculation can make a minor incident between powers escalate out of control”.

More than 100 foreign ministers were also due to attend the annual summit in the German city, although Russia’s foreign minister was reportedly not in attendance.