Vladimir Putin said that he considers the USSR's decision to march tanks into Hungary and Czechoslovakia to quash mass protests during the Cold War a mistake.
The Russian President made the comment when he was asked about the established perception of Russia as a colonial power when the Soviet Union sent tanks into Budapest in 1956 and into Prague in 1968, Knewz.com has learned.
Soviet tanks and troops crushed the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, during which around 2,600 Hungarians and 600 Soviet troops were killed. In 1968, the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and similarly crushed the 1968 Prague Spring. During the Warsaw Pact invasion, around 137 Czechs and Slovaks died, according to historians.
"It was a mistake... It is not right to do anything in foreign policy that harms the interests of other peoples," said Putin. The Russian tyrant added that the mistakes made by the U.S. were the same as the USSR and that Washington had "no friends, only interests," per Reuters.
The irony lies in the fact that this is the same man who sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022. According to Reuters, Putin's invasion triggered the biggest land war in Europe since the Second World War.
In the latest bout of the Russia-Ukraine tussle, Ukrainian forces have reclaimed several offshore oil and gas drilling platforms in the Black Sea near Crimea. In a statement from Ukraine’s military intelligence organization GUR, Ukrainian forces have reclaimed the drilling platforms known as the "Boyko Towers" in a "unique operation," per Guardian.
Russia occupied the oil and natural gas drilling platforms back in 2015, a year after it annexed Crimea, and it has been used for military purposes by Moscow ever since the beginning of the Ukraine invasion in 2022. Before Russia seized Crimea, the Black Sea shelf was a significant source of natural gas for Ukraine, and it supplied natural gas to Crimea as well as the mainland regions of Ukraine.