Analyst: Russia prepping military to fight U.S.

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WASHINGTON – The Russian military doctrine adopted in 2010 after the "reset" with the Obama administration considers the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, the main threats Moscow must be prepared to fight, according to Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

This is the assessment of Alexei Arbatov, a former Duma, or parliament, deputy and currently head of the Center for International Security of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Recent events have underscored the prospect due to the firing of Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who served under then-President Dmitry Medvedev, who now is the Russian prime minister.

Russian President Vladimir Putin replaced Serdyukov with Sergei Shoigu, who is more in line with Putin's outlook on the future role and capabilities of the military.

Under Medvedev, Serdyukov had a different approach, which was to more closely work with the West in an effort to obtain Western technologies and know-how to modernize not only Russian infrastructure but also the military.

All of that went away with Putin's more confrontational approach with the U.S. and his efforts to blunt American nfluence in Central Asia, which Moscow claims is in its sphere of influence.

Putin also aims to recreate a post-Soviet empire by incorporating the former Soviet republics into a Eurasian Union, a duty-free zone that he sees rivaling the European Union in years to come.

According to Arbatov, Russia's defense and foreign policies now reflect that Russia is surrounded by enemies led by the U.S. Moscow is concerned that the U.S. and its NATO allies will invade Russia at any time.

Arbatov said the U.S. is using the pro-democracy opposition inside Russia to subvert Putin's regime and intends to use that opposition to invade Russia.

In addition, he said that the West intends to use military power to seize Russia's natural resources.

Instead of looking to the West for modern technologies, Arbatov said Moscow will use its own technologies to improve Russian military capability in the future.

Already under Putin, there has been an increase in the work to target and divert militarily critical Western technologies, reminiscent of its actions at the height of the Cold War during the Soviet period.

To offset NATO's eastward expansion, Moscow intends to bolster its security arrangement under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, which is comprised of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Just as the 2010 Russian military doctrine still holds a nuclear weapons deterrent as the cornerstone of Russian security, there have been increasing indications that Moscow will be looking to develop more of a conventional force to counter what it perceives are new, more conventional threats.

WND/G2Bulletin recently pointed out that Putin doesn't just want to reform the Russian military but to boost its capabilities and to deal with the new realities stemming from the Arab Spring and its military experiences based on the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia.

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