MOSCOW, (Reuters) – Europe has squandered the  opportunity created by the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago  for a new era of cooperation between East and West, former  Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said yesterday.

Gorbachev, who presided over the collapse of the Soviet  Union, said he and other world leaders had hoped that the Wall’s  fall in 1989 would allow Europe to become a model of security  and peace for the rest of the world, but this had not happened.

“We have wasted the last 20 years,” Gorbachev, 78, told a  news conference at his charitable foundation in central Moscow.  “We have not done everything we should have done. It’s a great  pity.”

Gorbachev sharply criticised those in the West who claimed  to have won the Cold War by defeating the Soviet Union, instead  of viewing the end of East-West confrontation as a mutual  decision made for the benefit of all.

Dressed in a dark blazer and open-neck blue shirt, Gorbachev  at times stumbled for words and paused for thought as he took  the mainly foreign audience of reporters on a long amble through  the history of the Cold War’s final years.

Russians remain nostalgic for the superpower empire of the  Soviet Union and polls show they loathe Gorbachev for allowing  its collapse — an event Prime Minister Vladimir Putin described  once as the biggest geo-political tragedy of the 20th century.

Gorbachev said it was unrealistic to hope for the Soviet  Union to be rebuilt but called for the four key states which  formed its economic heart to unite again to form a free trade  area.