Trust, but verify had been popular in the USSR when Gorbachev was in college, saying that "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." Following the 2013 Ghouta attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry told a news conference in Geneva on September 14, 2013 that the United States and Russia had agreed on a framework to dispose of Syria's chemical weapons. He said "President Reagan's old adage about 'trust but verify' ... is in need of an update. And we have committed here to a standard that says 'verify and verify'." The similar phrase "Trust and Verify" was also
Treaty on the Creation of the USSR position but officially took over as a supreme authority in the USSR. One area where the Soviet division of power was not resolved at the time of the Treaty's signing, was Soviet Central Asia which contained several problems. A major battleground during the Russian Civil War, the region would remain unstable afterward. Turkestan came under Russian control fairly recently, between 1867 and 1885. Moreover, unlike other ethnic borders of the former Russian Empire, which were delimited during the Tsarist days (e.g. Transcaucasia lost its feudal administration by the mid-19th century), the Soviet authorities inherited two provinces that were "de jure"