Speaking to over a hundred uniformed foreign military attaches, he said that cooperation should move from exchange of delegations to more sophisticated forms like training personnel.

"There comes an understanding that there is a need for you and us to act more openly," he said, noting that a recent flurry of meetings with his colleagues from Germany, Poland, Switzerland, France and the United States reinforced this understanding.

"The more we will know each other, the more doors we will open... the more we will trust each other," he said in his end-of-the-year speech to the foreign attaches.

But Makarov, who is also first deputy defense minister, cautioned that there still remained a certain level of mistrust between the Russian and foreign military.

"A little wall of sorts is still remaining," he said, noting that it prevented better cooperation in fighting common threats like nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

"We need to remove this wall so that there are normal relations not only between the states but also between armies," he told his audience at the Academy of the General Staff whose halls are adorned with portraits of Russia's most-famous military commanders, including Stalin.

Makarov said Russia never planned to use its vast nuclear arsenals first and would launch a nuclear strike only if it faced an "immediate threat of liquidation of the state system."

Speaking of Russia's controversial efforts to reform its bloated outdated army, Makarov said a key problem was changing the Soviet-era mentality of the Russian soldiers.

"Our officers were trained in the Soviet Union," he said in response to a question from Captain Garry Newton, a British naval attache.

Another key challenge, Makarov said, was that the military equipment produced domestically was not up to Western standards.

"The most complicated task is providing (the army) with new equipment and weapons," he said.

Makarov, a proponent of modernising the country's conventional armed forces through procurement from Western suppliers, earlier this year admitted the military needs equipment that Russia cannot produce at present, and said the country could buy a Mistral-class helicopter-carrying assault warship from NATO-member France.

The deal, which would also include a license to produce several more warships in Russia, would be unprecedented since World War II, both in terms of the size of the equipment in question and Moscow's insistance since the war on producing all military hardware for its own use and export.

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