We'll have to remind the Russians of our Monroe Doctrine when they start patrolling the Gulf of Mexico

Saw the same information in "The Hill" today.

http://thehill.com/policy/internatio...gulf-of-mexico

Russian bombers to patrol Gulf of Mexico
Purpose of the patrols?

On to Russian military modernization

http://www.cfr.org/russian-federatio...ilitary-111014

As part of defense reforms, most Russian ground forces are to be professionalized and reorganized into formations of a few thousand troops for low- and medium-intensity conflicts. But for the foreseeable future many will remain one-year conscripts with limited training (military service is compulsory for Russian men aged eighteen to twenty-seven). The Airborne Assault Forces, which comprises about thirty-five thousand troops and whose commander answers directly to Putin, is Russia's elite crisis-reaction force. A Special Operations Command, also a reserve of Putin, was created in 2013 to manage special operators outside Russian borders.

Moscow is intent on remilitarizing its Arctic territory and is restoring Soviet-era airfields and ports to help protect important hydrocarbon resources and shipping lanes. (Russia has the world's largest fleet of icebreakers, which are regularly required to navigate these waters.) In late 2013, Putin ordered the creation of a new strategic military command in the Russian Arctic.
What do they see as threats?

One listed (there are others in the study)

Moscow believes the so-called color revolutions—a series of popular uprisings in former Soviet satellites—were concerted attempts by the United States and its allies to erode Russian influence in the region. "Russian foreign policy appears to be based on a combination of fears of popular protest and opposition to U.S. world hegemony, both of which are seen as threatening the Putin regime," writes Dmitry Gorenburg, an expert on the Russian military at CNA, a Virginia-based research institution.
Outside of the Artic, little in the above to explain Russia's aggressive aerial and proposed Naval patrolling in the vicinity of the U.S.. One can discern it is a show of power, not unlike we used to do to each other not too many decades ago.

As for the Color Revolutions

http://www.ponarseurasia.org/sites/d...g_Sept2014.pdf

Countering Color Revolutions

The speakers, which included top Russian military and diplomatic officials such as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, argued that color revolutions are a new form of warfare invented by Western governments seeking to remove independently-minded national governments in favor of ones controlled by the West. They argued that this was part of a global strategy to force foreign values on a range of nations around the world that refuse to accept U.S. hegemony and that Russia was a particular target of this strategy.
They may right that is a new form of old warfare. We do have a couple of noted authorities on how to promote and run non-violent revolutions who have even published books on it. Whether the U.S. supports this or not remains a question, but if our State Department does promote this type of activity, one would hope have Congressional oversight, so we prevent some idealist Georgetown graduate go rogue and promote instability in a country that may be contrary to our interests.