Washington, Aug 30 – The president of the United States, Joe Biden, said on Tuesday that the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at the age of 91, was a man with an “extraordinary vision “.
In a statement, Biden said that Gorbachev was a rare leader, with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it.
“The result was a safer world and more freedom for millions of people,” said the president.
Biden recalled his talk with the former Soviet president during his visit to the White House in 2009, when he was vice president, in which they discussed US and Russian efforts to reduce their nuclear stockpiles.
Gorbachev died today in Moscow at the age of 91, just as his country has renewed its antagonism with the West.
Neither the Gorbachev Fund nor those close to him had publicly reported on his state of health, but it was an open secret that “Gorbi”, as he was known in the West, was in poor condition.
Sources from the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital, where he died, denied that his death had any relation to the coronavirus, but rather to his advanced age and the different conditions he had.
In his last public appearances two years ago, the military parade on the occasion of Victory Day or the premiere at the Theater of Nations of a play that rehabilitated his figure, he was always seen in a wheelchair. wheel.
The former president will be buried in the coming days at the Novodevichie Cemetery of Illustrious Characters in the Russian capital along with his inseparable Raísa, who died of leukemia in 1999.
There also lie the remains of his greatest rival and the first democratically elected president in the history of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.