Choose Your Own (Kremlin) Adventure
Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin are grabbing headlines with last night’s row over the U.N. Security Council’s resolution on military intervention in Libya, after Putin likened it to ‘medieval calls for crusades‘. (Never mind, of course, that Russia’s failure to veto the move ‘effectively allow[ed] the allied assault to go forward.‘) Medvedev was quick to slam his comments, dramatically suggesting that they would cause ‘a clash of civilizations‘. The New York Times suggested that ‘[t]he apparent tension between the two men set off speculation about whether they were starting to jockey for attention in advance of presidential elections next year.‘
This BBC analysis makes the point that both of these positions are part of the tandem’s staged roles:
it is not clear whether these verbal differences mark a break in relations within the political “tandem” running Russia, or whether they simply reflect the two distinct roles which Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev have adopted as part of the same team: Mr Medvedev playing the “good cop” – the liberal reformer, the Westerniser, the moderniser – and Mr Putin representing the hardman of Russian politics.