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.
