MOSCOW, December 12. /TASS/. /TASS/. There were many instruments of external pressure on Russia in the 1990s as the country lost most of its sovereignty, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview for a documentary entitled "Russia: Its Recent History" aired on the Rossiya-1 TV channel on Sunday.

"There were very many instruments [of pressure], Russia was quite weak, it depended on various sorts of financial instruments and mechanisms, political and internal," he said.

"In this sense, it can be stated with regret that back then Russia lost a larger part of its sovereignty," he noted.

"As for sovereignty, I saw it when a I was prime minister in 1999, when following the beginning of our active combat operations in the North Caucasus an IMF mission demanded we stop them," the president recalled. "When I asked what the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, had to do with that, they told me that they thought it would impact the economy adversely. We argued that we were strengthening out statehood and, hence, a possibility for more efficient work in the economic sphere, but our arguments were ignored."

Russia back then asked for a "possible installment payment plan," the president recalled, adding that Russia had been denied such a possibility.