Russia's Putin tells his role in day of Berlin Wall fall
Putin has spoken for the first time to a television interviewer about the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Monday, 02 November 2009
Vladimir Putin has spoken for the first time to a television interviewer about the fall of the Berlin Wall and his role in confronting an angry German crowd of protesters while working as a KGB officer stationed in Dresden.
Putin, by far Russia's most powerful politician, described the Wall as something artificial and its end as "a normal, natural event", said the journalist who conducted the interview, Vladimir Kondratyev of Russian channel NTV.
"What had to happen, happened. I believe the division of Germany had absolutely no future," Putin said in an advance clip of the interview aired by NTV.
NTV will screen the full interview on Sunday evening.
Kondratyev, who was working for Soviet television in Bonn, West Germany in 1989, said that despite Putin's spy brief in East Germany "neither Putin, nor Kohl, nor Gorbachev -- nobody ...