Cold war communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev demands New Soviet Union stretching across Europe, Asia and Russia
Mr Gorbachev said Russia and the 14 other countries that made up the Communist superpower could "voluntarily" reunify within their Cold War borders
THE last Soviet leader of Russia says the USSR could reunite as Moscow continues to aggressively pursue power over its former lands.
Mikhail Gorbachev said former Soviet Union countries could form a new non-communist state in an interview to mark the 25th anniversary of its collapse.
Mr Gorbachev emphasised that although he did not believe it was possible to restore the Soviet Union, Russia and the 14 other countries that made up the Communist superpower could "voluntarily" reunify within their Cold War borders.
"The Soviet Union, no. But a union, yes," Mr Gorbachev, 85, told the TASS state news agency when asked if the Soviet Union could be revived.
Mr Gorbachev did not clarify when and why he envisioned Ukraine and Georgia, which have both been invaded by Russian troops in the past decade, entering into a union with Moscow.
The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which are Nato and EU members, would be very unlikely to enter into any alliance with Russia, analysts say.
The Soviet disintegration is widely considered to have begun with Mr Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms in the mid 1980s.
On December 8, 1991, after talks at a hunting lodge in Belarus, President Yeltsin of Russia, President Shushkevich of Belarus and President Kravchuk of Ukraine announced that the rapidly crumbling Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
Mr Gorbachev expressed regret over the dissolution. "My conscience is clean. I defended the [Soviet] Union until the end," he said. "It was both possible and necessary to reform it."
He said in a separate interview with the BBC: "I wanted to avoid having a civil war, and we were well on the way."
He called the demise of the Soviet state a "crime and a coup".
Once a critic of President Putin, Mr Gorbachev now praises him and accused the West of "provoking" Russia. Mr Putin has previously called the break-up of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.
He has been in power for almost 17 years, and could stay until 2024 if he secures a fourth term in 2018.
A poll released today by the independent Moscow-based Levada Centre showed that 29 per cent of those questioned said their attitude towards Mr Putin had worsened recently.
Alexei Navalny, the opposition figurehead, said yesterday that he would stand against Mr Putin in 2018. Widely considered the most serious threat to the president's rule, Mr Navalny, 40, was previously barred from participating in elections after being found guilty of fraud in 2013.
Russia's Supreme Court annulled the conviction last month after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that his right to a fair trial had been violated. The case against Mr Navalny has been returned to court for a new hearing.
Mr Navalny's announcement came as Russian police detained 15 people who gathered in Moscow on Constitution Day to read aloud from the constitution. Opposition activists were also arrested on Monday evening in St Petersburg and Saratov.