Disaster in store for Ukraine without Russia - Patrushev
MOSCOW. Oct 14 (Interfax) - A complete rupture of ties will be a blow for Russia and a disaster for Ukraine, said Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev.
"The Kyiv leadership must realistically assess the situation and understand that there is no alternative to broad relations with Russia," he said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta, to be published on Wednesday.
"I think Ukraine will be coming to in a tough and painful process. I hope this will occur relatively quickly, which could be facilitated by a host of objective factors. Whatever direction the situation will take, Russia and Ukraine will remain relevant to each other. Ukraine will not be able to develop successfully without Russia, whether one likes it or not," Patrushev said.
He said that interdependence between economic, logistics, and other ties between the two countries had taken centuries to form.
"It is not surprising that President Petro Poroshenko, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, was compelled to put off the implementation of the economic part of the association agreement with the European Union, already signed," he said.
"Predictably, the victorious euphoria that has filled the minds of the Kyiv leadership will be followed by a more sober assessment of the actual state of affairs," Patrushev said.
The Ukrainian crisis is the outcome of the United States and its nearest associates' activities, he went on to say. "These activities have been aimed over the past 25 years at tearing Ukraine and other former Soviet republic completely away from Russia, and at a total reformatting of the post-Soviet space to American interests. Conditions were being created and pretexts formed to incite color revolutions and back them with generous state funding," Patrushev said.
The regime change in Ukraine took Moscow by surprise, he also said.
"Our specialists had been predicting tensions in Ukraine in conditions of political-economic instability, but we must acknowledge that the probability of an instant seizure of power in Kyiv with support from militant groups of outspoken Nazis, was overlooked then, Patrushev said.
