JAKARTA - Russian President Vladimir Putin will miss the funeral of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday, due to his busy work schedule.
Gorbachev died Tuesday at a Moscow hospital at the age of 91. Gorbachev's body will be buried in the Hall ofjanks, which is famous in the House of Unions of Moscow, the same place Josef Stalin's body was buried after his death in 1953.
It will be open to the public and Gorbachev will then be buried at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, TASS news agency quoted Vladimir Polyakov, press secretary for the Gorbachev Foundation, as saying.
Gorbachev will be given an honorary guard to the military, but his funeral will not be carried out by the state.
State television on Thursday showed President Putin seriously placed the red rose next to Gorbachev's coffin, at the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital, where he died at the age of 91.
President Putin made a cross with the Russian Orthodox style before touching the edge of the coffin.
"Unfortunately, the president's work schedule didn't allow him to do this on September 3, so he decided to do it today," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Putin took more than 15 hours after Gorbachev's death to issue a message of condolences, saying Gorbachev had "a major impact on the course of world history" and "strongly understood that reforms were needed" to address the Soviet Union's problems. in the 1980s.
Peskov further explained that the Gorbachev ceremony will have elements of state funerals with the state helping to organize them.
However, that would be in stark contrast to Boris Yeltsin's funeral, which played an important role in excluding Gorbachev when the Soviet Union collapsed.
When Yeltsin died in 2007, Putin declared a day of national mourning and, together with world leaders, attended a state funeral at the Cathedral of Christ the savior in Moscow.
Putin immediately formed a special commission tasked with regulating state funerals, ordering the raising of the flag at half-mast.
Citing CNN, all Russian TV and radio channels at the time canceled entertainment programs and were ordered to broadcast funerals live.
Dozens of foreign and former world leaders were present, including former US President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, former British and Canadian Prime Ministers John Major and Jean Chrétien and former German President Horst Koehler.
Meanwhile, Gorbachev was unlikely to get many foreign VIP guests at his funeral.
In retaliation for the western sanctions imposed on Russia by western countries over the war in Ukraine, Moscow has barred hundreds of foreign officials from entering Russia.
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