Strongman, The

that he had gone one step too far to rejuvenate his image. He appeared in Kiev with his face looking puffy and bruised, and heavily made-up. ‘There are no bruises there,’ said his spokesman. ‘He was just really tired after several flights and extra meetings. Also, the light may have fallen on him in an unfortunate manner.’ But the press wondered if he had had a facelift, or botox injections, like his friend, the ever youthful Silvio Berlusconi.
    Medvedev did not try to match Putin’s strongman appearances – though he did begin to walk with an exaggerated swagger and to talk with rather aggressive mouth movements, not unlike Putin’s. But for the most part, his props were not fast cars and wild animals but iPads and tweets.
    Image was crucial to both men. They were appealing to different constituencies. By the end of 2010, with just a year to go before the coming parliamentary and presidential elections, two things were becoming crystal clear: that both men wanted to be the next president of Russia, and that it would be Putin who would decide which of them would go forward. Ultimately, the tandem was more of a penny-farthing.
    2011: Paralysis again – the phoney campaign
    In a sense the whole of Medvedev’s presidency was a slow-burning campaign for the next election. But as the final year began, paralysis once again afflicted the president’s Kremlin and the prime minister’s White House – just as it had done prior to the last election. The agreed line was that the two men would ‘decide together’ which of them would be the candidate in 2012, and they would announce their decision when the time was ripe. Officials in both camps began manoeuvring, uncertain of how the dice would fall. At the top levels, Medvedev’s and Putin’s spokespeople weighed every word like a raw diamond that could tip the scales. At lower levels, bureaucrats positioned themselves to jump ship if necessary when the situation became clear. At every level, officials were afraid of saying anything that might be a hostage to fortune.
    Mikhail Dvorkovich (the brother of Arkady, the president’s economic adviser) wrote in his blog: ‘Ministers, not knowing who is their real boss, are tripping up, trying to carry out often contradictory instructions. It’s no joke, having to choose between two people, either of whom could become president in 2012. One mistake and in a year you’re a “political corpse”.’
    At the end of February, Peskov told me to expect ‘hysteria’ around the world in a few months’ time. I took it to mean that Putin was going to announce his intention to run for re-election. But nothing was made public and the uncertainty continued.
    Both ‘candidates’ began an undeclared campaign, starting with a farcical argument over the choice of mascot for the Sochi Winter Olympics. Putin decided to demonstrate his ability to influence any decision in the country merely by expressing an opinion. Just as he had put the judge in the Khodorkovsky trial in an impossible position by declaring that ‘a thief should sit in jail’, so he casually opined that the snow leopard would make a fine Olympics mascot – just hours before a nationwide television vote on the matter. Naturally, the snow leopard was chosen. Medvedev was not happy. Two days later, talking about something completely different – the idea that possible designs for a new universal electronic ID card should be discussed on the internet – he added caustically: ‘I hope it will be fairer than the discussion of the Olympic symbols.’
    There were more serious spats to come. In March open disagreement broke out between the ‘candidates’ over the world’s response to Colonel Gaddafi’s crackdown on dissenters in Libya. At the United Nations, Russia abstained on Resolution 1973, which authorised the use of air strikes against Gaddafi’s forces. Russia’s position was a compromise: Medvedev had wanted to back the Western stance, his foreign ministry was against it. But Putin was outraged by it, and said so publicly. Visiting a ballistic missile factory in the republic of Udmurtia, he likened the UN resolution to a ‘medieval call to crusade’. He said he was concerned by the ‘ease with which decisions to use force are taken in international affairs’. He saw it as a continuation of a tendency in US policy: ‘During the Clinton era they bombed Belgrade, Bush sent forces into Afghanistan and then under an invented, false pretext they sent