"The change of power [in Ukraine] prompted those events that took place there. [U.S. Secretary of State John] Kerry has an assistant - [Victoria] Nuland, who said the United States spent five billion U.S. dollars to arrange those events," he said.

MOSCOW, June 22. /TASS/. The United States was behind the state coup in Ukraine having spent five billion U.S. dollars for these purposes, Russian Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper published on Monday.

He said it was absolutely clear that behind the "destabilization project in Ukraine was an attempt to create an instrument to weaken Russia dramatically." "Concurrently, they are seeking to solve the task of keeping the European Union countries on a short leash by imposing anti-Russian sanctions and approaches on them, ignoring their national interests," Patrushev said.

According to the Russian Security Council, the United States, which loathed Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovich, "decided to topple him by force."

"It was a political mistake," he said. "If they had waited a little bit, they would have been able to install people they like by legal means. But they engineered this coup instead. There would have been no developments in Crimea and eastern Ukraine if there were no coup."

Patrushev stressed that Yanukovich had postponed the signing of an association agreement with the European Union not because he had been pressed to do that by Moscow. "He simply came to realize that he overlooked what its implementation was fraught with. Ukraine is member of the free trade zone of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the consequences of this step were explained to Yanukovich. He had not reckoned with them before, so he decided to take a timeout to scrutinize the details," he said.

To blame Russia for the Ukrainian development, in his words, is to confuse the cause and the consequence. "It’s like to say that the wind is blowing because trees are swinging," he added.