Yeltsin’s opinion about Ukraine revealed in the USA

In the United States, the opinion of the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin about Ukraine was revealed. As follows from declassified documents, in the early 1990s, he called the country the main destabilizing factor, media reports.

“This is off the record. Our main destabilizing factor is Ukraine,” the head of state said at a meeting with his American counterpart George W. Bush in 1992, the transcript of which was made public.

Yeltsin explained that there are 11 million ethnic Russians in Ukraine, and Ukrainian nationalists are putting pressure on then-president Leonid Kravchuk. At the same time, the Russian leader assured Bush that Moscow had no imperial ambitions and would be attentive to the concerns of other countries.

In turn, former Finance Minister Yegor Gaidar assured the American president that the Yugoslav scenario would not occur in Russian-Ukrainian relations, despite the fact that overcoming differences would take a long time.

Earlier, the brother of the first Russian president, Stanislav Glebov, expressed the opinion that tense relations between Russia and Ukraine would continue for several more years. He also stated that his relative was not to blame for what was happening, and refuted the notion that the hostilities were “the fruit of Yeltsin’s activity.”