Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s hawk: the former dolphin climbs the Tsar on the right

After long and intense efforts, Dmitry Medvedev has finally managed to regain the front pages of international newspapers after a decade. His post on Telegram about how much he hates the West has been picked up and discussed by thousands of commentators around the world. A few lines, posted in the Telegram channel of the former Russian president on Tuesday morning, which collected millions of views in a few hours, and put the Kremlin in a certain embarrassment, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov forced to answer journalists’ questions about the externalization of Vladimir Putin’s former dolphin. Because in the Russian lexicon – the one used at the top of politics as in the chats in the kitchen of ordinary citizens – the unspecified “them” towards which Medvedev declares his hatred are Westerners, Europeans and Americans, others, the eternals enemies that for sixty years, since the time of Nikita Khrushchev and his missiles in Cuba, no one in Moscow has declared that they want to “disappear”, at least not publicly.

A 180-degree change for the man who, as president, was considered the leader of the regime’s liberals: he tweeted from his iPhone, ate hamburgers with Obama, went on a pilgrimage to Steve Jobs and dared to declare that “freedom is better. of non-freedom, ”a phrase that sounded almost subversive in the Russian political lexicon. Not chasing the veto at the UN, he had actually allowed the operation in Libya, one of the gestures of rupture that had cost him the “dismissal” by Putin, who brutally kicked him out of the chair he had made occupy from 2008 to 2012 (and then also dismiss him from the government). A long time ago: it had been months, in fact, that the former president had been distinguished by statements in extremely violent language. Only a week earlier, in an interview with Al Jazeera, he had threatened Russia’s use of atomic bombs. He had promised to fire missiles at the power palaces of Kyiv, and Washington, and to place Iskander with nuclear warheads aimed at Finland and Sweden. He had given “salami” to Olaf Scholz and “aunt” to Ursula von der Leyen. He had called the Europeans “fat”, “imbeciles” and “heirs of the Nazis”, ruled by “grandparents in the grip of dementia and exalted grandmothers”. He accused the Poles and the Germans of “dreaming of Hitler’s glory” and of wanting to invade and conquer Ukraine. Against this background, his ideas about Zelensky, “thief” and “drug addict”, an “American puppet” who rules “mad Nazis”, appear almost in the Russian propaganda media.

The problem is that Medvedev is not a TV presenter: the former president and former premier has been downgraded in the hierarchy of the regime, but still occupies the position of leader of the ruling United Russia party, and deputy secretary of the Security Council, the body of the highest hierarchs with which Putin consults. It is true that Medvedev’s real weight even within the party he officially leads is less than appearances, and the hasThe #penoso tag that stuck to him after his dismissal put a cross over his ambitions much more than Alexey Navalny’s complaints about his splendid Tuscan villas and vineyards. One of the reasons why the utterances on the verge of Medvedev’s scandal had not earned the headlines even in the Russian media is that he is now considered expelled from the Putinian magic circle: political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky, for example, believes that he is moved by “resentment”, and the post about hatred of Westerners appeared after the US canceled his son Ilya’s work visa. And political scientist Abbas Galyamov writes that the leader of United Russia, now aware that he is out of the big political game, aims to occupy the media role of the mad nationalist who enchants the “deep people”, left vacant by the death of Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

The uproar aroused by yesterday’s post, however, could be a signal not only of the discomfort of a declining politician, with Russian social networks making explicit insinuations about his alcohol abuse. According to Aleksey Venediktov, the well-informed former director of radio Echo in Moscow, Medvedev’s verbal escalation aims to challenge the head of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, chosen as Putin’s “dolphin” by the “hawks”. The former president is said to have returned to the list among the candidates also according to the sources of the usually well-informed site Meduza, and in this case it is possible that he is trying to make up for the past as a “liberal” by surpassing the reactionaries on the right with a paranoid rhetoric – ” They all hate us! Western decisions are dictated by hatred of Russia and the Russians! », He wrote a few days ago – which could be appreciated by Putin.

Moscow sources from the Ukrainian agency UNIAN instead believe that the former moderate’s turbonationalism is due to Putin’s plan to liquidate him definitively, after accusing him of the collapse of the economy, to hand over the leadership of United Russia to his daughter Katerina. Voices impossible to verify, but which all revolve around a transfer of power to the Kremlin, perhaps not as imminent as desired by many.