US President Joe Biden believes that Russia is trying to remain relevant in the world while being in a difficult situation. “They’re trying to stay relevant. They don’t want to be, as some critics have said, the Upper Volta with nuclear weapons,” Biden told reporters at the Geneva airport.
“Russia is in a very difficult situation. China is pressing them. They are desperately trying to remain a world power,” Biden said.
Before the disintegration, in the early 1980’s the Soviet Union used to be referred to as ‘Upper Volta with rockets’, meaning a third world state that just happened to have nuclear weapons. The USSR had become a Potëmkin state like the Potëmkin villages of the eighteenth century, a ruse built by the Russian Prince Grigory Potemkin, which had painted facades to mimic real villages and well-fed people for the officials to see.
Upper Volta referees to the former French colony Republic of Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, a West African state.
On Wednesday, Biden held talks in Geneva with Russian President Vladimir Putin .