View a slideshow of Russia's wildfires.
When your country, simmering for days in record-breaking heat, suddenly bursts into flame in 831 places, destroying half a million acres of land, killing 52 people, blanketing your capital in toxic smoke, and threatening to release old Chernobyl radiation into the atmosphere, someone has to take charge. If you're the Russian president, however, you will not be that person. You will sit in your office while your prime minister, his sleeves rolled up the way men of action tend to roll them up when they mean business, goes and tours the devastation, talks to grieving villagers, and shows the country that, hey, he's on it.
After the warm Moscow-Washington spring we've had, one would be forgiven for believing the conventional wisdom: that the aggressive, unpredictable Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is relaxing his hold on the reins a bit, and that President Dmitry Medvedev, the shy liberal, is finally coming into his own. The events of the last week, however, have served as stark reminders of who really is in charge -- and how empty the promises of Medvedev's modernization pitch actually are.
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First came the Minority Report law. Under the proposed policy, which came tucked into broader legislation designed to help Russian security forces fight terrorism, the Federal Security Service (FSB) would be able to issue warnings to people they thought were heading down the road to committing a crime -- possibly by throwing them into jail for 15 days.
When the law was introduced, people hoped that Medvedev the Liberal would step in and show Russians and the world that his country had gone beyond the point of punishing its citizens for acts not yet committed. Human rights activist Lev Ponomarev told the New York Times he hoped that Medvedev would show "the courage to oppose this bill." It would, Ponomarev said, win him much credibility and loyalty in liberal circles.
But then Medvedev cleared it up for everyone. Speaking at a press conference with Angela Merkel in Ekaterinburg on July 15, he said that not only would he sign it, but that he had initiated it. "The situation is extremely simple," the president said. "I don't really want to comment now on the changes in the legislation that are currently underway. But ... first I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that this is our internal legal system, and not an international act. Second, every country has the right to its own legal system, including its own intelligence agency. And we will do this. And what's happening now -- I want you to know -- is being done on my direct instructions."
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