The USSR still exists - Putin's advisor

Anton Kobyakov, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has made a controversial statement about the former Soviet Union. According to him, the USSR still exists legally because the procedure for dissolving the union has not yet been fully constitutionally implemented.

Speaking about this at an international forum held in St. Petersburg yesterday, Kobyakov emphasized that the USSR was established in 1922 by the Congress of People's Deputies, and its dissolution was carried out by this same body.

This idea has been repeated before by Russian lawyers and some political groups, with Putin's propagandists describing the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Accords as "without legal force" and not recognizing the dissolution of the USSR.

In particular, according to Kobyakov, from a legal perspective, the conflict in Ukraine should be called an "internal process."

"If the USSR had not been dissolved, then logically the Ukrainian crisis is an internal process," he said.