It’s a long time since Dmitry Medvedev was last considered a potential liberal hope for Russia. Most recently, after all, he has threatened to bomb any country that seeks to apply the International Criminal Court’s recent arrest warrant on Vladimir Putin and separately read a working group of the Military Industrial Commission a 1941 telegram from Stalin that threatened anyone who failed to meet their targets with being “smashing as criminals who disregard the honor and interests of the homeland.” What is going on?

A lawyer by training, who got to know the Russian president in St. Petersburg during the 1990s, Medvedev ran Putin’s first presidential election campaign in 2000, was his chief of staff between 2003 and 2005 and then first deputy prime minister between 2005 and 2008. Between 2008 and 2012, Medvedev was Putin’s anointed choice of presidential seat-warmer, to observe the forms of term limits and become a symbol of what could be called a kinder, gentler Putinism. He spoke the language of legalism, was a technocrat in love with his Western iPhone and iPad, and was happy to make much of his early passion for Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

Even so, he was essentially the front man with Putin now prime minister and puppeteer.

[Did anyone *really* take him seriously as anything else? He was a placeholder for Putin while the Russian tsar worked around the constitutional limits to the presidency. Not even Barack Obama bought the act; recall that the infamous conversation about having more flexibility after the 2012 election was a message explicitly intended for Putin, not Medvedev. The notion that Medvedev offered a break from Putinism was mainly for the useful idiots who wanted to pretend that Putin wasn’t a threat — including Obama and his team, who would go on to argue that the idea of Russia as a threat was the 1980s calling to get their foreign policy back. — Ed]