Putin positioning to reclaim Russian presidency

Kremlin experts say that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s high-profile involvement in wildfires and ownership of the recent spy scandal is designed to demonstrate to the Russian people that he is leading the country, not President Dmitry Medvedev. With the presidential election only one and a half years away, Putin is gearing up to make his leadership of Russia official once again.

While state-controlled media depict Medvedev keeping to his Kremlin office, it shows Putin traveling throughout Russia comforting fire victims, scolding local officials, and dictating to Medvedev how to handle the fires that have killed 40 people and destroyed 1.2 million acres around Moscow. Lilia Shevtsova, a Kremlin expert at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said that “Putin uses these difficult times to show the people who is the strong man in the country, who is the national leader, who is the can-do man—and who is just a Kremlin clerk.”

Putin also announced that he recently partied with the Russian spies who were discovered in the U.S. in June, and that they sang a song together from his favorite Soviet spy thriller.

More than two years ago, term limits forced Putin to surrender the presidential office and instead take the prime minister’s title. His endorsement guaranteed that Dmitry Medvedev would replace him as president, and also guaranteed that Medvedev would not actually replace Putin as Russia’s leader. Since then, the two have seemed to be in perfect lockstep, but the Trumpet has long predicted that Putin would eventually nudge Medvedev aside. In the last month, the nudging began.