30 years later, Putin still mourns fall of Soviet Union

Moscow, Dec 8 (EFE).- It has been 30 years since the dissolution of the USSR, but its heir Russia has yet to overcome the trauma of the fall the Soviet empire and its long-time president Vladimir Putin seems increasingly set on revisiting those wounds which still have not healed.

“The USSR was a unique system. We should have saved it,” Ruslan Khasbulatov the former speaker of the Parliament of Russia, told Efe.

“It was a great state with a powerful army, a gigantic administration and a powerful economy,” he added.

Putin has always considered the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.

The loss of Central Asia, the three Baltic republics and the South Caucasus was painful, but Putin has never been able to accept Ukraine’s independence and its rapprochement with the West.

“We are the same people,” Putin has repeatedly said.

Over the past few years, he has taken steps to revise the borders that were marked out after the USSR’s disintegration.

First, it was the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, then the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and the pro-Russian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbas in Ukraine. Integration with Belarus is in progress.

“There are fears that Putin will seek to revive the Soviet Union,” US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland told a Senate hearing this week.

“And who knows whether his appetite will depend on what he swallowed, or whether he will decide to move forward?” she added.