Medvedev’s New Appointment: Putin’s Glorified Postman Or Second In Command?
MESOP MIDEAST WATCH MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 10406
6-1-23 – Vladimir Putin’s appointment of former president and prime Minister Dmitry Medvedevto the post of Putin’s first deputy in the Military-Industrial Commission of Russia, aroused interest in the Russian press that is still free to speculate on the political ups and downs of the Russian political elite.
Mikhail Rostovsky, Moskovsky Komsomolets’ lead commentator dismisses the importance of the appointment because Medvedev does not like to delve into details, a requisite quality for overseeing Russia’s defense industry and assuring that it delivers what is needed for the war in Ukraine. Since Medvedev does not fit the bill for the job, Putin, to whom Rostovsky habitually ascribes supreme cunning, had a different purpose in mind. He wanted to elevate Medvedev into the world’s most important postman to deliver messages from Vladimir that the West would take seriously.
An editorial in Nezavisimaya Gazeta has a completely different take. Medvedev, whose political career appeared to be in the doldrums to the point that friends advised him to accept a graceful retirement, was now back as a contender for power. He had revived his political fortunes by reinventing himself as a super hawk on Ukraine and the conflict with the West, thus displaying a facility for shedding his former liberal ideological skin.
MEMRI presents both articles below:
Mikhail Rostovsky, despite the title of his article that alluded to the “tandem” between Medvedev and Putin in 2008, where the two replaced each other as president and prime minister and ruled together, does not believe that Putin intends to revive that era. He wrote:
Putin’s successor and predecessor at the president’s office of Russia, the only deputy to Putin at the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev unexpectedly added to his already impressive collection of offices, posts and titles yet another job at the close of 2022. Now he is also Putin’s first deputy in the Military-Industrial Commission of Russia.
The Military-Industrial Commission is a highly specialized body with the right to set a budget for public procurement in the defense sector. Given the former president’s well-known dislike of “digging into details,” it’s clear that this appointment is primarily of a symbolic nature.
But in the SVO era, Putin’s symbolic gestures often have a very important practical political purpose. Another Medvedev “promotion” is, clearly, one such gesture. The master of Kremlin has demonstrated that his former colleague from the ruling tandem is neither a flamboyant “blogger-commentator,” nor a washed-up politician, who is formally kept in the fold in gratitude for his past merits. In the Kremlin hierarchy, which has been reformatted to suit the needs of the current most acute moment, Medvedev has a new main function. This is exactly what it seems to be.
In May of 2012, Dimitry ceased to be president of Russia and almost immediately, in the capacity of the country’s new prime minister and Putin’s personal representative, found himself meeting with the then US president Barack Obama.
During the public part of the rendezvous, the sensitive microphones of journalists picked up the words of the former Russian first person, which instantly became a meme. Reacting to Obama’s remarks, Medvedev uttered the English phrase, “I will convey this message to Vladimir.”
Over the ten and a half years since then, the landscape of global politics has changed beyond recognition. But at the moment, Dmitry Medvedev’s main Kremlin function is still to transmit particularly important political signals: only this time he’s doing it not “to Vladimir” but “from Vladimir.”