[unfocussed_mike]

Putin is not thinking about the USSR. He's not a communist and he is not interested in a soviet union.

He is thinking about the pre-Tsarist Russian Empire. Which included a few countries that were not in the USSR.

[CRConrad]

AFAICS, it's all the same to him: If he were dreaming only of reviving the Tsarist (why "pre-"?) Russian Empire and not the Soviet Union, he'd hardly have gone on the record saying "the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of thetwentieth century".