Putin returning as president

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ended months of speculation by announcing last week that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and not Medvedev himself, will run for president next spring. Putin was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term after serving as president from 2000 to 2008, but said that the two had always had a pact to switch places next year. “The return of Vladimir Putin to the post of president is totally logical,” said Andrei Isaev of the ruling United Russia party. “Our society sees him as its leader and nothing else.”

Poor Medvedev, said Simon Shuster in Time. With a second term, the “self-styled Westernizer and reformer” might have had a chance to implement greater press freedom and less state control of the economy. But in Russia, what Putin wants, Putin gets. After Medvedev’s certainly reluctant announcement, Putin gave a speech “full of extravagant promises” to boost wages, end corruption, and rearm the military. The United Russia party immediately and unanimously adopted his speech as its platform.

Russians adore Putin, said Ralph Peters in The Washington Post. Unlike Soviet dictators, he controls “only public life, not personal lives.” Rather than conducting wholesale purges, he makes examples of individual victims, such as billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who dared to finance the opposition and now languishes in prison. Most important, he has “returned Russia to great-power status—largely through bluff.” He manipulated Europe into giving him natural-gas pipeline agreements and the U.S. into giving him a one-sided arms-control treaty. Putin is “a dangerous man, but a splendid czar.”

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His return is bad news for the West, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Prime Minister Putin was “openly hostile” to NATO’s intervention in Libya and a host of other Western initiatives. His return to the presidency is sure to jeopardize the recent “reset” in relations between Russia and the U.S. And now that the presidential term has been extended from four years to six, the world is probably looking at 12 more years of Putin. That’s too long under one leader for any country; for Russia, with its “tragic history of autocracy,” it’s downright ominous.