UNITED NATIONS, December 29. /TASS/. The United States and Western nations have betrayed the trust showed to them after the Soviet Union’s breakup, Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky has told reporters.
"Everybody was thinking that people in the West are our friends, that they really are giving us a hand so that we will live in some better place, a better world and nobody will ever remember about the Cold War, about East and West," he said. "But eventually things have gone other way very quickly."
"We saw that the intentions of our colleagues are not as innocent as it was presented at the beginning. We saw a lot of Americans and Europeans exploiting our country, trying to split it, to crush it, to split Russia further, to promote separatism in Russia, to promote divisions between Russia and newly emerged states," the diplomat continued.
He went on to say that the first ten years of modern Russia’s history were "very difficult, very challenging," and the country was "really on the brink of collapse."
However, after this trend was reversed in 2000s, "we have started to be perceived as a threat by the West, by the United States." "What we're having now we have is kind of a remake of the Cold War, Cold War 2.0," Polyansky said.
In his opinion, there are currently no reasons for ideological confrontation between the East and the West.
"There is no communist ideology that Russia or anybody else promotes, our economic structure is very close to that of the United States, or any other western country, but confrontation is there and the efforts to portray Russia as an enemy are also there," he said. "It of course brings to your mind some conclusions that the question was not of ideology but of geopolitical struggle, which is back to existence right now, unfortunately."
Russian President Vladimir Putin said at his annual press conference on December 23 that in the early 1990s the USSR did everything in order to build normal relations with the West. According to him, the West should have treated Russia as a potential ally after the collapse of the Soviet Union and facilitated its strengthening instead of attempting to induce "a further disintegration.".