A major presidential performance had been scheduled for last week in the Kremlin, but it was postponed indefinitely at the last possible moment and without any convincing explanation.
There is only one man in Russia who could have told Medvedev to think twice, and this man indeed has serious reasons for cutting short any deviation from the “party line.”
The peculiar two-headed form of leadership was designed by the over-confident “tsar” for presiding over a permanent party of distributing tons of easy money; but it cannot function in the situation of escalating squabbles between elite clans and gathering social discontent. Cutting Medvedev down to size with his address was easy, but now Putin has to decide how much longer he can postpone the hard tasks of managing rather than explaining away the crisis that has transformed his pet projects into toxic assets.