Reach out to Putin or risk a new arms race, Gorbachev warns US

The former Soviet leader has urged the winner of the US election to hold a Reykjavik-style summit with the Russian leader.

Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow on the 20th anniversary of the coup that ousted him on August. 19, 1991. Picture: AP

Mikhail Gorbachev has urged the winner of the US election to hold an early meeting with Vladimir Putin amid fears that the nuclear arms race the then Soviet president helped to end three decades ago is again spiralling out of control.

“The situation is very worrying,” said Mr Gorbachev, Soviet leader from 1985 to 1991.

“Whatever the result of the election, we need to resume a dialogue to get out of this frozen situation. We need a strong impetus from the presidents on both sides.”

Mr Gorbachev, 89, said the two countries should hold a “second Reykjavik” — a reference to his summit with Ronald Reagan in Iceland in 1986 that paved the way for a treaty eliminating 2692 short, medium and intermediate-range missiles. Donald Trump withdrew from the treaty last year.

“The situation that existed between the Soviet Union and the US in the mid-1980s was much more complicated than it is now between the US and Russia,” he said. “But we found a way out through trust, through understanding and building relationships with each other.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Mr Gorbachev called for a peaceful resolution of the crisis that has erupted in Belarus since last month’s contested election and hailed the reunification of Germany, the 30th anniversary of which is being marked on Saturday, as the result of the “wisdom” and “amazing maturity” of both Russians and Germans.

He also spoke movingly of his late wife, Raisa, to whom he was married for 46 years, calling her death “an irreplaceable loss”. A prominent — and stylish — figure always at his side, she died in 1999, aged 67, of leukaemia.

“Even now I cannot come to terms with it,” Mr Gorbachev said, his voice wavering.

“She is still with me. It is not just that I remember her.

“It is always as if I am with her and she is with me.”

The former Soviet leader, whose reforms, launched after he came to power in 1985, paved the way for the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and an end to the Cold War, has become increasingly alarmed about the subsequent deterioration of relations between Washington and Moscow.

His latest book, What is at Stake Now, published by Polity Books, reads as a lament for the direction the world has taken in recent years, bemoaning the rise of “populists and demagogues”.

Speaking by phone from Russia, Mr Gorbachev was as forthright as he was in the late 1980s, when, as a correspondent in Moscow, I watched him struggle in vain to contain the democratic and separatist forces unleashed by his attempts to reform communism.

Mr Gorbachev praised Mr Putin as “smart, strong-willed and hardworking” but urged him to reflect on what he had created, saying: “Does it make sense for political processes and decisions to continue to be geared towards a single person?”

The Sunday Times