Biden, Putin, and more memorialize Mikhail Gorbachev: 'A man of remarkable vision'
World leaders past and present are paying tribute to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at the age of 91.
"Mikhail Gorbachev was a man of remarkable vision," President Biden said in a statement. His radical reforms "were the acts of a rare leader – one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it."
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Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, whose family hails from Hiroshima (as noted by The Washington Post), celebrated Gorbachev's role in "overcoming a post-World War II division in Europe and the East-West confrontation," while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz remembered him as a "courageous reformer and a statesman who dared to do many things."
Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, meanwhile, who grew up in East Germany, hailed the Cold War-ending leader as a "unique world politician" who "fundamentally changed my life."
But perhaps no reaction was more notable than that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, in a brief message addressed to Gorbachev's "relatives and friends," described his compatriot as a "politician and statesman who had a huge impact on the course of world history."
