KINGSTOWN, Jamaica, CMC – Prime Minister Andrew Holness has joined the international community in paying tribute to the former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91.

READ: Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev dead at 91

“Internationally recognised for his role in ending the Cold War and building bridges with leaders outside of the Soviet Union, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev passed away yesterday,” Holness, who is on a visit to Trinidad and Tobago participating in that country’s 60th anniversary of political independence from Britain, wrote on his Twitter page.

“I extend condolences to his family and loved ones,” Holness added in paying respect to the Nobel Peace prize winner.

Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union had set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation.

Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital, said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness”.

While he was revered in the West, to many inside Russia, Gorbachev was a disaster with President Vladimir Putin once describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”