(Newswire.net— March 3, 2018) — The mission of current Russian President Vladimir Putin would be preventing the collapse of the Soviet Union that took place in 1991, if time travel were possible.
When asked at a forum in the Russian enclave Kaliningrad what he would change in Russian politics if he was to travel back in time, the president of the Russian Federation replied that he would see to it that the collapse of the USSR never takes place.
AP reminds that Putin attracted a lot of attention back in 2005 when he said in his State of the State speech that the disintegration of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.
While the statement did not really surprise anyone because Putin often expressed a regret for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he did provide, however, an unexpected explanation.
While all the officials and guests at Kaliningrad Forum think of great military power, and huge territory, Putin said he regrets that it is no longer possible for one simple man to become the leader of the nation as it was in the USSR.
“You see, all my ancestors were peasant serfs, and I am head of a state,” he explained.
The comment follows the day after President Putin announced that Russia had developed allegedly invisible new nuclear weapons, causing concern that a new arms race might occur, such as those of the Soviet era.
In addressing the nation, Putin said that Russia has tested a whole range of new strategic nuclear weapons the likes of which an opposing party would be unable to intercept. He also mentioned a high-speed underwater drone, which has intercontinental range.
Praising new Russian weapons, Putin presented a new “Avangard” hyper-type intercontinental rocket that flies 20 times faster than the speed of sound and “a meteor strike,” another rocket dubbed “Satana” in the West and a Kinzal rocket system.
The Russian leader stressed that the development of new tactical nuclear weapons was due to the US withdrawing from the Cold War Agreement on the prohibition of missile defense and US efforts to develop a missile defense system.
According to Putin, the United States ignored Russia’s complaints and efforts to preserve the agreement.
“No one has listened to us, now they hear us,” the Russian president said.
Apparently US President Donald Trump listens very carefully. He has extended the sanctions imposed by former President Barack Obama in March 2014 against Russia and Russian individuals by another year.
President Trump also announced the development of hypersonic intercontinental nuclear missiles to counter the new Russian “invincible” rockets.
The military budget of the US is ten times the size of the Russian military budget, however, according to DARPA, the budget the Pentagon has is not nearly enough for the development of such a system.
“The dollars that were allocated in this budget were great, but they were really focused on adding more flight tests and getting some of our offensive abilities further down the line into operational prototypes,” Steven Walker, the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said.
“We do need an infusion of dollars in our infrastructure to do hypersonics,” he said.
In 2016, it was reported that the Pentagon had intentionally buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste amid fears Congress would use the explosive findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget. In 2018, an additional $1.4 trillion has been approved for patching the glitchy F-35 program.