It was in December 1989, on what will remembered as one of the coldest and stormy weekends ever to hit Malta, that then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met then US President George H. W. Bush in Marsaxlokk Harbour, a meeting which is regarded as having ended the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall, a symbol of the division between East and West, had just been brought down. The Iron Curtain, which had separated the blocs since the end of World War II, was lifted. Decisions which had been taken at the Yalta Conference in 1945 were reversed. “From Yalta to Malta”, the media had screamed in those days.

Gorbachev died on Tuesday, aged 91, as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine six months after its invasion. Ukraine was one of the 15 countries that emerged from the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Days after the first military intervention in Ukraine last February, Gorbachev – winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990 – called for the cessation of hostilities, and for negotiations to start “on the basis of mutual respect and recognition of interests”.

The war in Ukraine still rages.

In those eventful days of the late 1980s, the words “glasnost” and “perestroika” became household additions to the media vocabulary, in whichever language. They mean “openness” and “restructuring”, and this was the basis on which Gorbachev set out his reforms. In his writings, he said he could never understand why in spite of all the resources that the Soviet Union had, tens of millions of people were living in poverty.

The end-result was the collapse of the authoritarian Soviet state, the freeing of Eastern European nations from Russian domination, and the end of decades of East-West nuclear confrontation. Historians say that it was not Gorbachev’s intention to have such turmoil, but the tornado he unleashed quickly led to the developments that brought down the Soviet empire and changed the course of history.

Some blame him for the implosion of the Soviet Union, and many of his supporters later deserted him and made him a scapegoat. From the powerful Soviet leader he was at the height of his career, he polled less than one per cent of the popular vote when he ran for President in 1996.

Many of his countrymen despised him, while the Western world praised him for his vision as he collected awards and accolades in all corners of the world. There was a strong contrast between what the world thought of Gorbachev, and what the people of his country did.

Gorbachev will be remembered as one of the great leaders that shaped the world. But the “shape” he helped create continues to be challenged.

Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine is seen by many as an attempt by Russia to recover what it lost 30 years ago, and fears amount that this could just be the start of something bigger.