MOSCOW, February 1. /TASS/. The Western countries from the first days of the emergence of the Soviet Union were determined to ruin it, an aide to the Russian Security Council’s secretary has said in a newspaper interview.

"The West, led by the United States, from the first years of the creation of the Soviet Union, has hatched plans for the destruction of the USSR, and with the cessation of its existence, it proceeded with the destruction of Russia," Nail Mukhitov said in an interview the government-published daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta carried on Wednesday.

Mukhitov drew attention to what US presidential national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his book The Grand Chessboard in 1997: "After the victory over communism, we need a split in Orthodoxy and the collapse of Russia, and Ukraine will help us in this, where betrayal is the norm of public morality."

Mukhitov stated that immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States began to fight against Russia: it began to "set nationalities and confessions against each other and undermine the once strongest education system in the world."

"US propaganda has managed to brainwash many to a point where they begin to suffer because they do not see foreign brands on supermarket shelves, they refuse to replace Coca-Cola in their diet with something else, and still dream of getting an education and employment abroad. Young people erroneously think that studying abroad is more prestigious. It is true that they are actually waiting for our students there, but not in order to give a good education," he warned.

Mukhitov stressed that many Western universities "have long turned into a factories for reformatting the worldview of young people, who, after returning home, begin to doubt Russia’s spiritual and moral values and the greatness of our state." In the meantime, "only strong-willed people can resist the coven of vice," he believes.