Leaders’ Spat Tests Skills of Survival in the Kremlin
By ELLEN BARRY
NYT
MOSCOW — It was a strange week for Russia’s political elite.
On Monday, officials were confronted with a rare moment of open disagreement between the two men who run the country. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin issued a lacerating critique of the allied attacks on Libya — the kind of protest that accompanied Western interventions in Iraq and Kosovo. President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who had articulated a more pro-Western position, rebuked his mentor, calling Mr. Putin’s language “unacceptable.”
This put Russia’s army of pro-Kremlin politicians in the uncomfortable position of navigating between the two men, either of whom could be president next year. And like children caught between squabbling parents — driven by the instinct for self-preservation that is universal — they did everything they could to avoid choosing one over the other. As Russia’s Parliament on Wednesday devised a statement on the subject, it fell to political outsiders to state the obvious.
“I understand that you are stuck between two towers of the Kremlin, but why should Russia’s international prestige suffer as a result?” said Leonid I. Kalashnikov, a Communist lawmaker who advocated using Russia’s veto power at the United Nations to block the airstrikes. His colleague Anatoly Y. Lokot described the compromise statement, which doled out equal criticism to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and the West, as “the art of sitting on two chairs.”
(More here.)
NYT
MOSCOW — It was a strange week for Russia’s political elite.
On Monday, officials were confronted with a rare moment of open disagreement between the two men who run the country. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin issued a lacerating critique of the allied attacks on Libya — the kind of protest that accompanied Western interventions in Iraq and Kosovo. President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who had articulated a more pro-Western position, rebuked his mentor, calling Mr. Putin’s language “unacceptable.”
This put Russia’s army of pro-Kremlin politicians in the uncomfortable position of navigating between the two men, either of whom could be president next year. And like children caught between squabbling parents — driven by the instinct for self-preservation that is universal — they did everything they could to avoid choosing one over the other. As Russia’s Parliament on Wednesday devised a statement on the subject, it fell to political outsiders to state the obvious.
“I understand that you are stuck between two towers of the Kremlin, but why should Russia’s international prestige suffer as a result?” said Leonid I. Kalashnikov, a Communist lawmaker who advocated using Russia’s veto power at the United Nations to block the airstrikes. His colleague Anatoly Y. Lokot described the compromise statement, which doled out equal criticism to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and the West, as “the art of sitting on two chairs.”
(More here.)
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