How to honour Mikhail Gorbachev’s life in his death

Even in death, Mikhail Gorbachev symbolised the difference between Russia as seen by Russians and as seen by the rest of the world. Hailed as a hero and a visionary abroad, he was always regarded more circumspectly at home.

His role in ending the Cold War guaranteed him a saintly status in the West, because he took the one decision that mattered: not to resist by force the collapse of the Soviet Union. For Russians, though, he will always be associated with the loss of prestige of what was in effect an empire. Even if they reluctantly accepted that the communist experiment had failed, they resented the messenger.

The basis of Vladimir Putin’s support, on the other hand, has been his unapologetic Russian nationalism. No wonder the Russian president was “too busy” to attend Gorbachev’s funeral on Saturday.

Asked what specific business would occupy Mr Putin that day, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said that the president had a series of working meetings, an international phone call and needed to prepare for a business forum in Russia’s far east that he is scheduled to attend next week.

This is the kind of storytelling in which the Kremlin has been engaged throughout Mr Putin’s long years as Russia’s leader. Increasingly, the fictions seem to outsiders to be harder to maintain. The idea that the invasion of Ukraine is a “special operation” to protect Russian speakers from Ukrainian aggression was always moonshine, but enough of the Russian people wanted to believe it. Some in the West assumed that, once Russian soldiers reported back to their families from the front line, Mr Putin’s propaganda machine would start to break down, but it would seem that Russian nationalism is a stronger force than mere facts.

And yet it remains vitally important that the world’s free media and international organisations continue to report the facts about Mr Putin’s war. That is why we are so proud of the months-long investigation led by Bel Trew, our international correspondent, into evidence of war crimes committed by Russian forces.

As she reports, the investigation has found new evidence of hostage-taking, the illegal transfer of civilians and the forcible disappearance of them into prisons in Russia. The Kremlin claims that the 2 million Ukrainians who have been moved to Russia since the start of the war are part of an evacuation effort to save lives. This is contradicted by the detailed testimony that The Independent has gained from individuals who have been returned to Ukraine as part of prisoner swaps, and from the families of the disappeared.

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This evidence is a reminder of why Ukrainians are fighting, and why it is the duty of the international community to support them. Mr Putin plainly hopes that Ukraine’s allies will balk at the expense of supporting national self-determination – hence his shutting the taps on the gas pipelines to western Europe.

There is no doubt that the coming global recession is a high price to pay for Ukrainian sovereignty. But whoever becomes prime minister on Tuesday needs to affirm that Britain will pay that price. The principles of human rights, democracy and self-determination are beyond price. We owe it to the memory of Mikhail Gorbachev to stand by those principles, and to hope that the Russian people will come to see that he was right.