What Putin meant when he said the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Russians in a broadcast in April 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. People think that this means that he is a Communist or that he wants to take back the other Soviet republics. Neither is true. 

Discount writers who quote that statement to mean either of those things. They are probably neo-cons and certainly don't understand.

Remember that Putin enlarged on it later, saying: “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”

Christopher Caldwell, in an article I just re-read that he wrote in 2017, says:

The degradation of Russia’s position represented by the Serbian War is what Putin was alluding to when he famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This statement is often misunderstood or mischaracterized: he did not mean by it any desire to return to Communism.

I don't know if Putin only meant the Kosovo war. I can see nothing on the net to support Caldwell's statement and there were many other indications of Russian weakness that Yeltsin presided over, but the Kosovo war was a huge humiliation for Russia. Putin was talking about how Russia had fallen into grave decay. 

The whole article is interesting,  especially in hindsight. I think Christopher  Caldwell is the best political writer living, better even than Douglas Murray. He is genuinely writing contemporary history.