Medvedev is ‘dead man walking’ as Putin undoes his Russian reforms

By Marc Bennetts - Special to The Washington Times
Monday, March 4, 2013

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, once one of Russia’s most popular leaders, is now politically a “dead man walking” as his former mentor, President Vladimir Putin, undermines him, leading many to predict that the ruthless president is preparing to dump his reform-minded protege.

Mr. Medvedev, 47, was always the junior partner in the Kremlin duo with Mr. Putin, the 60-year-old former KGB officer. They even traded the top government spots so Mr. Putin could remain in power.

But somewhere between Mr. Medvedev’s term as president from 2008 to 2012 and Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency in May, the political romance faded.

Mr. Putin has been reversing Mr. Medvedev’s reforms, making slander a crime again and imposing Kremlin control over the direct election of Russian governors. Meanwhile, the pro-Putin state-controlled media ignores the prime minister or carries negative stories about him.

Analysts generally agree that Mr. Medvedev’s dismissal and political obscurity are imminent.

But Mr. Medvedev proved too independent for Mr. Putin, who served as prime minister during his presidency. Mr. Putin, president from 2000 to 2008, could not seek a third consecutive term under the Russian Constitution and tapped Mr. Medvedev to be a place-holder until he could run again in 2012.

There also has been widespread speculation that Mr. Putin, who as president appoints the prime minister, could replace Mr. Medvedev with Sergei Shoigu, the newly installed and popular defense minister.

Mr. Putin’s irritation with Mr. Medvedev stems in part from his belief that the younger politician’s support for reforms as president gave birth to an anti-Putin movement. As prime minister late last year, Mr. Medvedev expressed public sympathy for Mr. Putin’s critics.

“Certain issues that are being voiced [by the opposition] are probably reasonable, and the authorities should take action on them,” Mr. Medvedev said.

Mr. Medvedev also spoke out for a milder handling of a feminist punk group whose anticlerical and anti-Putin prayer in a Moscow cathedral landed several of its members in jail last year. Mr. Putin accused the group of “undermining moral foundations” of Russia, but Mr. Medvedev criticized the court’s harshness in imposing a three-year sentence on the musicians.

Analysts also suggest that Mr. Medvedev’s dismissal would help Mr. Putin isolate high-level advocates of political, social and economic reform.

“A new element of the Kremlin’s strategy is to seek to discipline its own supporters and to weaken these groups in the elite in which Vladimir Putin has limited confidence,” Jadwiga Rogoza, an analyst at the Center for Eastern Studies, said in a report issued by the Warsaw-based think tank. “The Kremlin is starting to treat them as a group that will not necessarily support the president in the event of an escalation of problems and will rather try to build up its own political capital by playing on such instability.”

With Mr. Putin’s popularity falling slowly but steadily, Mr. Medvedev could be dismissed in a bid to boost the president’s declining approval ratings.

A poll released by the independent Levada Center last week indicated that only 32 percent of Russians would vote for Mr. Putin if presidential elections were held this month.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/4/medvedev-dead-man-walking-putin-undoes-reforms/#ixzz2Mfow5mAL

unlike the journalists who have been killed, attacked, or harrassed in Russia during the last decade, Kashin is not a fringe or opposition figure. When I first met him, in the winter of 2006, to interview him about the politics of young Russians -- his specialty -- he struck me as a Kremlin apologist. Kommersant is Russia's most prominent daily, a mainstream paper owned by Medvedev buddy and mining mogul Alisher Usmanov.

I was, of course, wrong about Kashin. He is not an apologist but is, in the best traditions of his generation, simply hard to categorize. He covers youth movements for his paper, and he is equally unsparing in his coverage of both the pro-Kremlin organizations, like Nashi and Molodaya Gvadia, and the opposition ones, like the Yabloko and Antifa movements.

American TV journalists of KMID channel while preparing a story about the death of the Russian child talked to a child psychologist and found that Risperdal is also often prescribed for common disorders of psychological development and ASD.

Adepts of the so-called Attachment Therapy recommend wrapping children in a carpet, and then sitting on them. Children are also kept under a cold shower for a long time, locked in a toilet and left without food for several days. Many "advanced" parents on the advice of psychologists come up with even more sophisticated methods, making, for example, children dig their own graves. All these savage practices are implemented by proponents of the attachment therapy as the best way to get children to be obedient and break their will.

Also read: Sadistic methods of raising children all the rage in USA

Sometimes this is not enough. For example, when the goal is to get the desired result, absolute submission, as quickly as possible, powerful psychotropic drugs can help. Last year, the U.S. General Accountability Office issued a report stating that adopted children are given strong psychotropic drugs ...

Moldova, the country that has recently become the world record holder for anarchy, is in the midst of yet another political crisis.

Here's some good Pravda fun:

Meanwhile, Alessandra Stanley lowers her reputation by labeling "The Way You Look Tonight" a "sappy standard." What idiocy.