I would like to assure you that there is no organization or any sort of repression against people who don’t agree with our actions, for example in Ukraine, Crimea, or any other external issue, no one from official government organs do this.

I have called President Obama, and President Obama called me on various issues. This is part of our regular contacts, there is nothing unusual or extraordinary about it.

25 million of Russian people suddenly turned out to be outside the borders of the Russian Federation. They used to live in one state; the Soviet Union has traditionally been called Russia, the Soviet Russia, and it was the great Russia. Then the Soviet Union suddenly fell apart, in fact, overnight, and it turned out that in the former Soviet Union republics there were 25 million Russians. They used to live in one country and suddenly found themselves abroad. Can you imagine how many problems came out?

Just take Kosovo: back then, UN bodies decided that Kosovo should become independent of Serbia and that the interests of Serbia's central government had to be subordinated. You can read that in all the records, also in the German ones.

If we had joined efforts some time ago [with U.S], we could have avoided many problems the world is facing now, I believe.

The point is that in any country, including the United States, may be in the United States even more often than in any other country, foreign policy is used for internal political struggle.

The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.