MOSCOW. June 3 (Interfax-AVN) - Planned European Union armed forces would be "much more powerful" if Russian military units were integrated into them, and Russia would then be automatically drawn into European military structures while the EU would be more successfully in operations such as Afghanistan, argues Alexander Khamchikhin, a Russian analyst.
"European Union armed forces are being set up today. This may not be a source of joy for the United States because the European military would to an extent be an anti-NATO entity. But the process is no longer reversible. And it seems to me that it would be possible to integrate the Russian Armed Forces into the European military to a certain extent," Khamchikhin, head of department at the Institute for Political and Military Analysis, told a roundtable on NATO-Russia relations in Moscow on Tuesday.
Brigades would be the structural basis of the EU forces, Khramchikhin said. Russia is replacing divisions with brigades in the course of the current restructuring of its armed forces. This means that Russian brigades "could be integrated with European and would make the potential European military much more powerful," the analyst said.
"Russia would then be automatically drawn into European military structures. This would enable the European Union to act more successfully in Afghanistan, for instance," he said.