MOSCOW, September 2. /TASS/. The West turned Ukraine into a ‘bargaining chip’ in pursue of its geopolitical ambitions, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with Mongolia’s Onoodor daily.

"Ukraine virtually turned into a bargaining chip that the West used to achieve its geopolitical ambitions," Putin said.

According to the Russian president, "The main reason for today’s tragic situation in Ukraine is the deliberate anti-Russia policy pursued by the US-led collective West."

"For decades, they have sought total control over Ukraine," he continued. "They funded nationalist and anti-Russia organizations there; they persistently worked to convince Ukraine that Russia was its eternal enemy and the main threat to its existence."

Putin continued by saying that "the current situation in Ukraine has been significantly influenced by a whole range of external and internal factors. Soviet leaders' decisions on the national and territorial issues also had their negative effect."

The Russian president reminded that "the process of the creation of Ukraine started immediately after the 1917 revolution, when unstable and fragile quasi-state formations without clear borders emerged in that territory."

"Later on, the boundaries of the constituent USSR republics were marked rather randomly, based on the ‘proletarian necessity.’ Thus, the industrial Donbass populated predominantly by Russians was handed over to Ukraine," he said.

"Subsequently, just before and after the Great Patriotic War, Joseph Stalin gave to Ukraine, as an inalienable part of the Soviet Union, certain lands that had earlier belonged to Poland, Romania and Hungary. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev made a generous present to Ukraine by giving it Crimea, which had been part of the RSFSR."

"It should be understood that the Soviet leaders acted under the geopolitical realities of their time, not expecting at all that the USSR would cease to exist and break down along artificially drawn internal administrative boundaries. So, no doubt, the current developments do have historical roots," the Russian president stated noting that "In 2014, the Americans and their satellites organized an armed coup d'etat in Ukraine."

According to him, this coup d’etat "was inspired and driven by radical neo-Nazi groups, which subsequently came to determine Kiev’s government policy in general."

"For many years, millions of civilians in Donbass have had to survive genocide, shelling and blockade on the part of the Kiev regime," Putin said. "The hatred for everything Russian has become Ukraine’s official ideology."

"The use of the Russian language has been increasingly restricted, and the canonical Orthodoxy has been subjected to persecution, which now has come to the point of a direct ban," he concluded.