Putin’s Military Budget

Vladimir Putin has remained eerily quiet since the news broke that his long-standing Finance Minister had had enough of wanton profligacy and was going to part ways with the Kremlin.  In a Bloomberg interview on Monday, Andrei Kostin of VTB bank said that though he had not discussed the matter with the Prime Minister, he seemed to be a in ‘a good mood’.   Alexander Golts in a Moscow Times op-ed yesterday pointed out that the military expenditure to which Kudrin so heartily objected is in fact his ally Putin’s priority, not Medvedev’s.  It may have been the President who had the task of reminding Kudrin of who’s boss in a very public fashion; if only he actually was the boss.  Streetwise Professor, who shares Golts’ view that the real conflict lies in the Putin-Kudrin nexus attempts to unravel the riddle:

[I]t appears that Putin has not interceded on Kudrin’s behalf; Kudrin ran to daddy, and daddy did not intervene on his behalf.  Perhaps not surprising, given that one interpretation of Kudrin’s outburst is that it was directed not at its ostensible target–Medvedev–but at Putin instead.  But who knows for sure?  Perhaps Putin told Kudrin to keep his powder dry, and at some decent interval after the election, Medvedev will have served his purpose and be kicked to the curb.  But I cannot get beyond the fact that everything Kudrin said about Medvedev’s profligacy (especially with respect to defense) really applies to Putin.  This cannot have escaped Putin.