Putin honors Gorbachev
Russian President Vladimir Putin privately laid flowers at Mikhail Gorbachev’s coffin on Thursday, snubbing the public funeral in a move reflecting the Kremlin’s uneasiness about Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy.
Just before departing for a working trip to Russia’s western-most Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, Mr. Putin visited a Moscow hospital where Mr. Gorbachev’s body was being kept before Saturday’s funeral.
Russian state television showed Mr. Putin walking to Mr. 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.
Mr. Gorbachev, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, will be buried at Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery next to his wife, Raisa, following a farewell ceremony at the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions, an iconic mansion near the Kremlin that has served as the venue for state funerals since Soviet times.
Russian oil chairman falls to his death
The chairman of Russia’s second-largest oil company, Lukoil, died Thursday after reportedly falling from the window of a Moscow hospital where he was being treated after suffering a heart attack.
Ravil Maganov, 67, fell from a sixth-floor window at the Central Clinical Hospital around 7 a.m. local time, the state-run Tass news agency reported.
It was not clear whether Mr. Maganov’s death was an accident. Conflicting theories emerged in the Russian media, with Tass citing an unnamed source in law enforcement as saying that Mr. Maganov had been taking antidepressants and killed himself.
An online outlet with links to the police reported that the oil executive might have slipped while smoking on a balcony.
China to U.S.: Repeal tech export curbs
The Chinese government on Thursday called on Washington to repeal its technology export curbs after California-based chip designer Nvidia said a new product might be delayed and some work might be moved out of China.
The latest controls add to mounting U.S.-Chinese tension over technology and security. American officials say they need to limit the spread of technology that can be used to make weapons.
Nvidia said it was told last week it needs a U.S. government license to export any product with performance equal to its A100 graphics processing chips or better to China, Hong Kong or Russia. It said buyers of the A100, and development of the newer H100, might be affected.
But in an amended disclosure Thursday to U.S. securities regulators, the company said the U.S. government was offering some reprieve by authorizing certain chip exports that will enable Nvidia to keep supplying them to American customers through March.