Russia is not trying to bring back the USSR, but "nobody wants to believe it", Vladimir Putin has said.
The Russian president accused European leaders of confusing Russia with the Soviet Union, while in the same breath vowing to enhance the country’s nuclear weapons, in an interview aired late Sunday.
The interview, which forms the basis of the documentary film World Order, was broadcast on the state-run Russia-1 television channel.
The film, widely believed to serve as propaganda for Mr Putin’s domestic audience, also saw the president talk up the Kremlin’s role in the Syria conflict and criticise the West.
Vladimir Solovyev, one of the film’s authors, told the RIA Novosti news agency that Mr Putin’s comments were made after his annual press conference on December 17.
Although the film includes interviews with other political figures and leaders, Mr Putin is undoubtedly the headliner.
The trailer begins with Mr Solovyev dramatically asking, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, is there going to be a war?”
“You mean a global war?” the president responds, before launching into a speech on the dangers of nuclear weapons.
“I would like to think that there is not a person on the planet crazy enough to decide to use nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that this would lead to a “planetary catastrophe”.
At the same time, he said Russia would continue to improve its own nuclear weapons as a means of deterrence.
“The nuclear triad is the basis of our nuclear safety policy, but we have never waved around and never will wave around this nuclear truncheon, even though in our military doctrine it is given a proper place and proper role,” Mr Putin said.
The nuclear triad consists of strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Another of Mr Putin’s main messages in the film was that the West mistakenly believed Moscow wanted to bring back the Soviet Union.
“As for Ukraine and the post-Soviet space in general, I am actually convinced that the position of our Western partners, both European and American, is connected not with protecting the interests of Ukraine, but with an attempt to prevent the revival of the Soviet Union, and no one wants to believe us when we say it is not our goal to restore the Soviet Union,” Mr Putin said.
According to him, such thinking is counterproductive and Russo-phobic.
“As I have already said, these are relics of the Cold War, of the past, and it is these things that don’t let us move forward. Europe was expanded, broadened at the expense of Eastern European countries, which with great suspicion have always regarded the Soviet Union, and that (suspicion) has been shifted to contemporary Russia,” Mr Putin said.
He also praised the Kremlin’s actions in Syria, saying the “integrity” of Moscow’s positon on the conflict gave its campaign “power”, Telegraph reported.
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