Dmitri Medvedev’s debut on the international stage at the G-8 summit will be scrutinized at home, even more than it is abroad, wrote The Guardian in its editorial yesterday. This gives the Russian president, just two months into his job, even less room for maneuver than the limited amount he already had. If nationalists believe that Vladimir Putin, and he alone, put Russia back on the map as a world power, his successor must show that he is just as tough and independent. So Medvedev’s G-8 performance will inevitably be assessed in negative terms back home: The competing elites who run Russia are less concerned about his ability to form fruitful relationships with Western leaders than they are to detect the first hairline crack in the steel joists supporting Putinism. The youngest man at the summit has to show he is strong and he will not do that by cuddling up to the likes of Gordon Brown.
There were few signs that he did when the two men met for the first time on Monday. Call, as each man might, for a new era, they are still left with concrete, unresolved problems left over from the old one. Every few months a fresh bilateral dispute erupts. No detectable progress was made on any front yesterday. Nor is the EU any clearer about how to deal with a Russia that is as assertive abroad as it is authoritarian at home. The European debate about Russia vacillates between accommodation and confrontation. Neither appeals. To accommodate Russia is to turn a blind eye to the values which lie at the heart of the European project — democratic elections, rule of law, respect for human rights, each of which have suffered painful reverses under Putinism. To confront Russia risks making a bad relationship worse. And for all the rhetoric about a return to the days of the Cold War, it could still get a lot worse. So, while the EU vacillates in its post-modern way, unable to make up its mind, Russia, in distinctly pre-modern style, divides and rules, picking its partners and dispensing its oil riches.
