Gorbachev died shocked and bewildered by Ukraine conflict, says interpreter

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow's worsening ties with Kyiv, his interpreter said on Thursday.

Pavel Palazhchenko, who worked with the late Soviet president for 37 years and was at his side at numerous US-Soviet summits, spoke to Gorbachev a few weeks ago by phone and said he and others had been struck by how traumatised he was by events in Ukraine.

"It's not just the (special military) operation that started on Feb. 24, 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," Palazhchenko told Reuters in an interview.

"It was very obvious to us in our conversations with him that he was shocked and bewildered by what was happening (after Russian troops entered Ukraine in February) 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."

President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what he called a "special military operation" to ensure Russia's security against an expanding Nato military alliance and to protect Russian-speakers.

Kyiv says it is defending itself from an unprovoked imperial-style war of aggression and the West has imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow to try to get Putin to pull his forces back, something he shows no sign of doing.

In photographs of 1980s summits with US President Ronald Reagan, the bald, moustachioed figure of Palazhchenko can be seen time and again at Gorbachev's side, leaning in to capture and relay every word.

Now 73, he is well placed to know the late politician's state of mind in the period before he died, having seen him in recent months and been in touch with Gorbachev's daughter Irina.

Gorbachev, who was 91 when he died on Tuesday from an unspecified illness, had family connections to Ukraine, said Palazhchenko. He was speaking at the Moscow headquarters of the Gorbachev Foundation where he works, and where Gorbachev kept an office dominated by a giant portrait of his late wife Raisa whose father was from Ukraine.

Ukarine conflict

While in office, Gorbachev tried to keep the Soviet Union's 15 republics, including Ukraine, together but failed after reforms he set in motion emboldened many of them to demand independence.

Soviet forces used deadly force in some instances in the dying days of the USSR against civilians. Politicians in Lithuania and Latvia recalled those events with horror after Gorbachev's death, saying they still blamed him for the bloodshed.

Palazhchenko said Gorbachev, who he said believed in solving problems solely via political means, had either not known about some of those bloody episodes beforehand or "extremely reluctantly" authorised the use of force to prevent chaos.

Gorbachev's position on Ukraine was complex and contradictory in his own mind, said Palazhchenko, because the late politician still believed in the idea of the Soviet Union.

"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," said Palazhchenko.

"He liked to say that history is a fickle lady. I think that he believed and that he expected that the final verdict will be positive for him."