President Vladimir Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago as the demise of what he called "historical Russia" and said the economic crisis that followed was so bad he was forced to moonlight as a taxi driver.
Putin's comments, released by state TV on Sunday, are likely to further fuel speculation about his foreign policy intentions among critics, who accuse him of planning to recreate the Soviet Union and of contemplating an attack on Ukraine, a notion the Kremlin has dismissed as fear-mongering.
"It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union," Putin said of the 1991 breakup, in comments aired on Sunday as part of a documentary film called "Russia. New History", the RIA state news agency reported.
"We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost," said Putin, saying 25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called "a major humanitarian tragedy.”
Putin also described for the first time how he was affected personally by the tough economic times that followed the Soviet collapse, when Russia suffered double-digit inflation.
"Sometimes (I) had to moonlight and drive a taxi. It is unpleasant to talk about this but, unfortunately, this also took place," the president said.
Putin, who served in the Soviet-era KGB, has previously called the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was ruled from Moscow, as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century, but his new comments show how he viewed it specifically as a setback for Russian power.
