Putin says he pulled Russia back from the edge of the abyss

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that he had pulled Russia back from the edge of the abyss after the chaos which accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, and had built the country into a sovereign power able to stand up for itself.

Putin, a former KGB spy who took the Kremlin's top job just eight years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, is the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin who died at his dacha outside Moscow in 1953 aged 74.

Asked by the BBC if he had looked after Russia, something that Boris Yeltsin had asked him to do before handing over the presidency at the end of 1999, Putin said he had.

"We have moved back from the edge of the abyss," Putin said.

"I have done everything to ensure that Russia is an independent and sovereign power that is able to make decisions in its own interests," Putin said.

He said that the West had patronised Yeltsin initially but then had changed its tune once Yeltsin spoke up against Western actions such as the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Putin, born just seven years after World War Two, has promised Russians victory in the Ukraine war, which he casts as a proxy conflict between holy Russia and an arrogant West which he says humiliated Russia as the Soviet Union crumbled.

The Kremlin chief admitted that there were problems such as inflation but said that Russian economic growth rates currently far outstripped those of Britain.

"But we are ready to work with Britain if Britain wants to work with us," Putin said, adding that Russia would cope just fine without Britain if there was no such cooperation.

(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Olesya Astakhova; Writing by Maxim Rodionov; and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn)