People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain.

The sooner the Iraqi people are able to take their country's destiny in their own hands and establish their own control over it and its national resources, the sooner the process of pushing the forces of international terrorism out of Iraq will be able to begin. And the sooner the process of consolidating Iraqi society itself will also be able to begin.

I believe that meetings at the top level in a relatively informal atmosphere are always useful, and there is reason to hope that we will make progress in resolving the matters we will be considering.

I don’t regret anything. I did everything absolutely correctly.

We would like to see science and higher education developing here [on the Russian Far East], so that it could become one of the major research centres in the entire APR system. Undoubtedly a lot remains to be done here, but given the labour market demand, the relevance of such a university is undeniable.

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

This, for instance, is what Egon Bahr said on June 26, 1990: "If we do not now undertake clear steps to prevent a division of Europe, this will lead to Russia's isolation."Bahr, a wise man, had a very concrete suggestion as to how this danger could be averted.