Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin has said the fall of the Soviet Union 15 years ago this week was "inevitable" but ex-Soviet states are "fated"to stay together."All empires in history have ceased to exist. It's a historically inevitable process that was pre-determined for the USSR too," Yeltsin told the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.
He also said people "must not forget by any means" the lack of freedom of speech and the food shortages that characterised the later years of the Soviet Union.
