Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s funeral and will not designate it a state funeral, the Kremlin announced Thursday.
The Kremlin’s top spokesman said Putin’s “work schedule” will keep him from attending the ceremony on Saturday honoring the last leader of the Soviet Union and that while it will have “elements” of a state funeral, it will not be recognized as one. Putin paid his respects to the late leader on Thursday at the Moscow hospital where Gorbachev died earlier this week at the age of 91.
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“Unfortunately, the president’s work schedule will not allow him to do this on Sept. 3, so he decided to do it today,” Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday, according to Reuters.
Peskov added that the Russian government will provide a military honor guard for the funeral of Gorbachev, who will be buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow after a public ceremony in the city’s Hall of Columns.
Putin waited more than 15 hours after Gorbachev’s death before releasing his first public statement of condolences, stating that the Soviet leader who dissolved the Soviet Union had a “huge impact on the course of world history” and “deeply understood that reforms were necessary.”
Putin was shown on state television Thursday placing roses beside Gorbachev’s open casket in Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital. He bowed his head and touched Gorbachev’s casket before making the sign of the cross and walking off less than a minute later.
#Putin left his bunker to attend the funeral of #Gorbachev. pic.twitter.com/BHpW72HPDb
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) September 1, 2022
Gorbachev, who is credited with ending the Cold War, seemed at odds with Putin in recent years. He promoted free speech and democracy across the world through his Gorbachev Foundation in contrast to the Putin regime’s strict laws on speech and public expression and fondness for authoritarianism.
Putin has said he considers the fall of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, blaming Gorbachev.
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Nikita Khrushchev, who died in 1971, was the last Russian leader not granted a state funeral.
Full state honors were granted to the last Russian leader to pass away, Boris Yeltsin, who died in 2007 and who hand-picked Putin as his successor in 1999.
