West wrong to pin hopes on Russia’s collapse – Fyodor Lukyanov

The West should abandon the thought that the Ukraine conflict will cause Russia to collapse like the USSR did in 1991, foreign affairs expert and RT contributor Fyodor Lukyanov has said.

Lukyanov, a program director at the Valdai International Discussion Club, moderated a more than three-hour-long session with Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of the club’s annual forum last week.

Putin said at the event the current tensions with the US and EU stem from the fall of the Soviet Union. Since then, Moscow has repeatedly tried to build good relations with Western countries, but their leaders have persisted in doing “everything they could to truly isolate and further break apart Russia itself,” Putin stressed.

During his appearance on RT’s East Meets West podcast with Olga Bataman and Tara Reade, Lukyanov said that “there are a lot of grounds on our [Russian] side to believe that we can win… by military means” in the conflict with Kiev.

“Paradoxically, Ukraine has the same idea based on another calculation, based on the expectation that the Western support will not stop and that on “a very traditional, old, good belief that Russia at some point will suddenly collapse,” he said.

According to the analyst, the same idea is also prevalent among the Western elites. It’s being “partially inspired by what happened relatively recently in our history, 35 years ago. The collapse of the Soviet Union played a very negative role because they started to believe that it can be repeated,” he noted.

Lukyanov said that he has already given up explaining to his American and European interlocutors that Russia is “different” and that it “will not collapse as the Soviet Union, but people in the West and now in Ukraine, they still believe it’s possible.”

The analyst also suggested the EU’s current hostility towards Russia should be explained by its leader’s trying to “find a way how to consolidate societies” amid “enormous” political, economic and social problems experienced by the bloc as a whole and its individual member-states.

They seek “to blame someone else and to find a menace which, as during the Cold War, can unify Europe,” he stressed.