The rhetoric of the Russian President hardly changed in two years later, when during the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2016, Vladimir Putin said that the West backed the “coup in Ukraine” and frightened Russian speakers and that the West supported separatism in the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR: “When we were able to cope with this we are faced with another problem. Well, there is no Soviet Union any more, but for some reason the West need to constantly move to Russian borders,” admitted Putin during his speech. He also said that the West supported the color revolutions, which “led to chaos” . In addition, the Russian President assured that he would work with the opposition if “they legally came to power.
