Mikhail Gorbachev was “shocked and bewildered” by Russia’s war with Ukraine in the months before he died, his translator has said.
Pavel Palazhchenko worked as the former Soviet leader’s interpreter for 37 years and had spoken to him on the phone just weeks before he died on 30 August.
As a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, Mr Palazhchenko said that his former boss had been rendered distraught by the Kremlin’s deteriorating relationship with Kyiv.
Speaking to Reuters, he said: “It’s not just the operation that started on 24 February, but the entire evolution of relations between Russia and Ukraine over the past years that was really, really a big blow to him.
“It really crushed him emotionally and psychologically.
“It was very obvious to us in our conversations with him that he was shocked and bewildered by what was happening for all kinds of reasons.
“He believed not just in the closeness of the Russian and Ukrainian people, he believed that those two nations were intermingled.”
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The Kremlin said on Thursday that Mr Putin would not be attending Mr Gorbachev’s funeral due to conflicts in his “work schedule”.
He was pictured laying flowers at the late president’s open-casket coffin on Thursday.
Having eased tensions with the United States and been credited with helping end the Cold War, Mr Gorbachev’s foreign policy strategy was almost the opposite of Mr Putin’s.
The late leader backed a protest movement against Putin that followed fraud-tainted elections in 2011.
Mr Gorbachev also criticised Mr Putin’s decision to return to the Kremlin for a third term in 2012.
The current president hit back by accusing the former Soviet president of “abdicating” power.
A year later, Mr Gorbachev said of Russia and Mr Putin: “Politics is more and more turning into an imitation of democracy. All power is in the hands of the authorities and the president.
“The economy is monopolised. Corruption has taken on colossal proportions.”
Gorbachev-Ukraine relations complicated by views on Crimea
Although seemingly disgusted by the war, Mr Gorbachev’s relationship with Ukraine was not straightforward.
In 2016 Kyiv banned him after he told The Sunday Times he would have done the same as Mr Putin in illegally annexing Crimea.
He told the newspaper: “I’m always with the free will of the people and most in Crimea want to be reunited with Russia.”
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Mr Palazhchenko, who at 73 had kept in regular contact with Mr Gorbachev and his daughter Irina, said relations were made difficult by the fact that he still believed in the Soviet Union – despite its breakdown in 1991.
“Of course in his heart the kind of mental map for him and for most people of his political generation is still a kind of imagined country that includes most of the former Soviet Union,” he said.
But asked whether Mr Gorbachev would have invaded Ukraine, he replied: “Of course I can’t imagine him saying ‘this is it, and I will do whatever to impose it’, no.”
