Vladimir Putin will not attend the funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has said, in what will be seen as an extraordinary snub by the Russian president.
Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday aged 91, would also not receive an official state funeral, a Kremlin spokesperson indicated, making him the first leader since Nikita Khrushchev not to be given that honour.
The spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said schedule constraints meant Putin would not attend a public farewell ceremony at Moscow’s House of Unions, or the funeral at Novodevichy cemetery on Saturday. “Unfortunately, the president’s work schedule will not allow him,” Peskov said.
Putin did pay his respects to the Soviet leader on Thursday morning, leaving flowers by Gorbachev’s coffin at the mourning hall of Moscow’s Central Clinical hospital.
Footage played on state television showed the president laying a bouquet of red roses at an open coffin next to a portrait of Gorbachev. The Kremlin leader bowed several times while making the sign of the cross. It was the first time Gorbachev’s body had been shown to the public.
Peskov said Putin would be flying to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave in Europe, later on Thursday. In remarks at a local school later on Thursday, Putin defended his war in Ukraine, claiming that Russia’s enemies were “starting to create an anti-Russian enclave that threatens our country”.
“That is why our boys, who are fighting there, are protecting both Donbas residents and defending Russia itself,” he told local students, according to the newswire Interfax. “And that, of course, deserves support from the entire public.”
The remarks were part of a new Kremlin-initiated educational module called “conversations about important things” that critics of the war have called a way to indoctrinate schoolchildren in pro-war propaganda.
Gorbachev’s farewell ceremony would contain “elements of a state funeral, such as a guard of honour”, Peskov said. “The funeral ceremony will be arranged. In this case, the government will help organise the funeral.”
Peskov said he was not sure if that would constitute a state funeral, and he would have to look at the formal definition.
Boris Yeltsin, the only other former Kremlin leader to die during Putin’s time in power, was given a nationally televised farewell ceremony at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Putin, then prime minister, also declared the day of Yeltsin’s death a day of national mourning.
Putin had a strained relationship with Gorbachev, who initiated policies that ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin has called the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.
Gorbachev criticised Putin, carefully at times, for rolling back democratic reforms and reintroducing elements of repression that at times recalled the Soviet era.
Meanwhile the city of Berlin ordered official flags to be lowered to half-mast during Gorbachev’s weekend funeral as calls grew for a fitting tribute to the last Soviet leader in Germany.
“We want to appropriately honour the accomplishments of our honorary citizen Mikhail Gorbachev in bringing about the political transformation of (communist) East Germany,” Berlin’s interior minister, Iris Spranger, said in a statement.
Spranger said Germany also owed an enduring debt to Gorbachev for allowing its reunification after the cold war.
Officials from across the political spectrum expressed their gratitude to Gorbachev, with some calling for a street or square in Berlin to be renamed to honour a man credited with allowing a peaceful end to the cold war and paving the way for democracy to sweep through central and eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall’s fall.
“Germany has a lot to thank him for, he is one of the fathers of reunification and gave millions of people their freedom,” Markus Söder, the conservative premier of southern Bavaria state, told the daily Münchner Merkur.
The veteran far-left MP Gregor Gysi hailed Gorbachev’s contribution to “peace, disarmament and German unity” in an interview with the news website Der Spiegel.
He called for a commemoration that would “point up the difference” between Gorbachev and the current Russian president.
Gysi said such a gesture would ensure that “the strong criticism of Putin doesn’t lead to rejection of Russia as a whole” in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.
