Dmitry Medvedev has traveled a long way since his time as President of Russia, once stood by US President Barack Obama, declaring that “solutions to many world problems depend on the joint will of the US and Russia.”
In his semi-official role this week as a Kremlin attack dog, Medvedev hinted twice that President Donald Trump’s administration pushed the US and Russia into war, warning about Russia’s nuclear capabilities.
Medvedev is the vice-president of the Russian Security Council, but he does not use enforcement force. But his provocative comments this week still made a splash.
Medvedev said on Telegram on Thursday that Trump should imagine the apocalyptic television series The Walking Dead, referring to the Soviet ability to launch an automatic nuclear strike.
The US president on Friday ordered two nuclear submarines to move to “appropriate areas.”
The skirmish comes after President Putin sets a new deadline for the war in Ukraine.
Unlike current leader Vladimir Putin, who is now the KGB agent, Medvedev cuts a different number than when he became president of Russia at the age of 42. I am pleased with the Internet – again, unlike Putin, he was keen to modernize the Russian economy and tackle corruption.
However, his presidency was seen as a stopgap for Putin to maintain constitutional limits and maintain power.
“Very Dangerous Business”: John Bolton responds to Trump’s Nuclear Order
Since Putin resigned from the president in 2012 to allow him to return to the post, Medvedev has changed from a relatively liberal technocrat to an untangled, provocative social media position, as he has untoldly untook the Russian enemy with a provocative social media post.
Compare what he said in a 2009 CNN interview – Russia “had to have a good, developed relationship with the West in every sense of the word,” and this comment in May and “There’s just “really bad things” happening in Russia about Trump’s words about Putin. I know it’s really bad.
That change appears to have started following his presidency. Medvedev began to rearrange himself to maintain the trust of the dominant Russian party.
In 2012, he told lawmakers: “They often said, ‘You’re a liberal.’ I can honestly say to you: I have never had any liberal beliefs. ”
As president, Medvedev told CNN that “the level of corruption is decisively unacceptable.” But then the prime minister was the target of an investigation by the Anti-Corruption Foundation of opposition Alexei Navalny, who claimed he had accumulated a “corruption empire” of luxury property, luxury yachts and vineyards across Russia.
Medvedev spokeswoman Natalya Timakova has rejected the investigation. It quickly won 14 million views on YouTube as a “promotional explosion,” but Medvedev became the target of street protests.
In 2020, he suddenly resigned as prime minister as Putin began a constitutional overhaul and solidified his power.
Since then, from his Security Council seat, he has launched a stream of xenophobia and offensive attacks on Ukrainians and Western leaders. Medvedev has a Russian and English X account with 1.7 million subscribers to Telegram and a total of 7 million followers.
After a full-scale invasion of Russia’s Ukraine, Medvedev called Kiev’s leadership “cockroaches breeding in bottles.”
In a speech earlier this year, Medvedev featured images of Trump and Ukrainian President Voldimi Zelensky as Muppets, urging the “destroy of the Kiev neo-Nazi regime.”
He frequently reminds me of the ghosts of Nazism, and this year, the new German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz said, “I proposed a strike at the Crimean Bridge. Think twice, Nazi!”
And while he is not afraid to rattle nuclear sabers, he said in 2022 that “the idea of punishing a country with one of its greatest nuclear capabilities is ridiculous and could pose a threat to the existence of humanity.”
Medvedev is pleased too To people attack. Last month, he untold Trump in a social media post. “Don’t go down sleepy Joe Road,” he said, referring to Trump’s own explanation of former President Joe Biden.
Despite his odd rhetoric, Medvedev has played a calculated role in the Kremlin message, according to analysts.
The War Institute states that it is “used to amplify inflammatory rhetoric designed to infuse panic and fear among Western decision makers.”
But the commentator says he should literally not be taken.
In reference to this week’s trip, Anatol Lieben of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Three-Dimensional Learning described both Medvedev’s remarks and Trump’s response as “pure theatre.”
“With the last three years of refraining from using nuclear weapons, Russia clearly does not intend to launch them in response to new rounds of US sanctions,” Lieben said.
At that press conference with Obama in 2009, Medvedev was a confident and freshly created president, seeing more than Putin’s placeholder. He said that day, “We have major nuclear weapons and we are fully responsible for those arsenals.”
Sixteen years later, he has the freedom of a provocateur.
