Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev summed up the results of the first year of the work of the government headed by him on the television channel NTV on Sunday.
Medvedev noted that he keeps “friendly relations” with Vladimir Putin, the Kommersant daily noted. The prime minister gave this response to the question about the dropping of the term ‘tandem’. Despite the fact that people “are constantly seeking to set us apart artificially (Medvedev and the president) and say, “You are so different, that means that you have different views, you should argue with each other,” Dmitry Medvedev pledged that this is not so. He noted that without Vladimir Putin he could “hardly” have arrived from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1999.
Speaking about ‘the rumours’ over a possible dismissal of the government, the prime minister agreed that “there is no smoke without fire”: the dismissal will “compulsorily take place,” but the only question is “when”. “There is always be a good deal of reasons for this, because we live already in a new epoch,” he said, noting that the talks about the dismissals do not help him, but also do not hamper him. The prime minister acknowledged that he just said so to the members of his team, “My colleagues, do not worry, let’s work, because all of you will be dismissed all the same sooner or later. You can do a good deal of useful things.” “To the moment of his leaving of the authorities” a state official “should get ready from the moment of his appointment to the post,” Dmitry Medvedev said with confidence.
According to the Russian Constitution, the change of the government is really inevitable, at least with each presidential elections, the newspaper cited political expert Boris Makarenko as saying. “Medvedev could say that the talks about dismissals hamper the government to work efficiently. If he shows loyalty, he did not voice his opinion in this,” the political expert noted.
“Medvedev is feeling Putin’s irritation, he obviously does not know what to do with it,” political expert Konstantin Kalachev told the Kommersant daily. Probably, the prime minister hopes that “during the recession, he will be able to stay at his post, sacrificing several members of the Cabinet,” the expert believes, “while Medvedev has a rating and people’s memory about the tandem, though they are being blurred.”