"In 1993, we said that military conflicts have been ruled out, but life has shown this is not the case," Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia's National Security Council, was quoted as saying by news agencies.

"There have been regional and local conflicts, and we cannot rule out large-scale conflicts and we need to be ready for this," Patrushev told reporters after a meeting in Saint Petersburg.

Patrushev made the comments while discussing a new version of Russia's military doctrine, the main strategic planning document for the country's armed forces, which officials have been drafting in recent months.

The current doctrine dates to 2000 and the previous version before that was from 1993, when the collapse of Communism seemed to usher in an age of peaceful relations between Moscow and its former Cold War foe Washington.

Last week Patrushev said the new doctrine would allow Russia to carry out a "preventative" nuclear strike against would-be aggressors, a loosening of Moscow's current policy on the use of atomic weapons.

The new doctrine will be presented to President Dmitry Medvedev by the end of this year, said Patrushev, who is also a former head of Russia's powerful FSB security service, the successor to the Soviet KGB.

earlier related report
NATO faces major budget shortfall: spokesman
NATO faces a budget shortfall of millions of euros in coming years, which is expected to grow as demands on the military alliance increase in places like Afghanistan, a spokesman said Thursday.

"In the next few years we foresee a shortfall of several hundred million euros between what governments have committed to do within NATO budgets when it comes to operations and capabilities, and what they have allocated in terms of money to pay for that," spokesman James Appathurai said.

"That shortfall will only grow as NATO's responsibilities grow as well," he told reporters in Bratislava, where NATO defence ministers are meeting for talks which will include discussion of spending problems.

He said that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen would urge the 28 member nations to try to set better priorities, pool their resources and assets and strive to be more cost-effective.

"The financial situation in the world ... makes it all the more important that a little bit of imagination and political courage is demonstrated when it comes to the money aspects of what we do," Appathurai said.

A NATO diplomat said Tuesday that the budget hole would amount to between 500 and 600 million euros (750-900 million dollars) in the alliance's infrastructure budget.

A separate budget is used to fund military operations and is, for the moment, unlikely to be greatly effected, he said, on condition of anonymity.

"NATO is facing a resource crunch next year," he said, describing it as "significantly worrying" and "a problem that we have never had before."

An expert also said that about 30 percent of the infrastructure budget was being used for the operation in Afghanistan, on items such as communications, but that the mission, NATO's most challenging, was not under threat.

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