By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Capitalising on the increasingly bellicose rhetoric in Moscow, a group of influential retired generals yesterday said the United States was preparing to invade Russia within a decade.
Interviewed by Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia's biggest circulation newspaper, the four senior generals - who now direct influential military think tanks - said the United States had hatched a secret plan to seize the country's vast energy resources by force.
"The US is both laying the ground and preparing its military potential for a war with Russia," said Gen Leonid Ivashov, a former joint chief of staff.
"Anti-Russian sentiment is being fostered in the public opinion. The US is desperate to implement its century-old dream of world hegemony and the elimination of Russia as its principal obstacle to the full control of Eurasia.
The generals said the conflict would inevitably spark a third world war, but predicted it would be fought only with conventional weapons or "low impact" nuclear missiles.
Dismissed by some critics as the Cold War nostalgia of a handful of Soviet dinosaurs, such opinions nevertheless reflect a growing mood of nationalism both within the Kremlin and among many ordinary Russians wistful for lost superpower status.
Engaged in a bitter dispute with Washington over its plans to erect a missile defence shield in central Europe, Vladimir Putin has increasingly used the kind of anti-American rhetoric many assumed had disappeared with the Cold War.
Once more casting the United States as Russia's main threat, the Russian president, a former KGB spy, has accused Washington of "diktat" and "imperialism" - even going so far as to liken America to the Third Reich.
 Original Source