MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin privately laid flowers at former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s coffin on Thursday. He won’t attend the weekend’s public funeral.
Just before departing for a working trip to Russia’s western-most Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, Putin visited a Moscow hospital where Gorbachev’s body was being kept before Saturday’s funeral.
Russian state television showed Putin walking to Gorbachev’s open casket and putting a bouquet of red roses next to it. He stood in silence for a few moments, bowed his head, touched the coffin, crossed himself and walked away.
“Regrettably, the president’s working schedule wouldn’t allow him to do that on Saturday, so he decided to do that today,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a conference call with reporters….