At a conference last week in Moscow of the Kremlin-backed United Russia party, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proposed current President Dmitry Medvedev to head the party list for the Duma (parliament) elections in December.
Medvedev generously responded by proposing Putin as United Russia’s candidate for the Russian presidential election in March 2012.
The cat was finally out of the bag: the outcome is clear, and so the presidential election is effectively already over.
This should come as no surprise. The elites in the Kremlin and Lubyanka –the head office of the Federal Security Service (FSB) secret police — have one overriding political goal: to keep control for themselves. Their leaders, first and foremost Putin as their effective boss for the past 12 years, have an urgent need to secure amnesty for their crimes — and this is precisely why Putin has to come back to presidential office for the next 12 years.
In Russia, politicians enjoy de facto immunity for crimes committed while in office. Theoretically, however, indictments can be brought after they leave office. The only person who cannot be dismissed and therefore cannot be indicted is the president — so if you have reasons to avoid trouble, this is the position you want to hang on to.
Vladimir Putin has a lot to answer for, and very good reasons for wanting not to do so. He is directly responsible for the second Russian war in Chechnya, in which an estimated 100,000 people have been killed. This is a crime against humanity, and arguably genocide.
Everybody knows of the colossal level of corruption in Russia, in particular among the political leadership. A few years ago, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky made sensational allegations in the German newspaper "Die Welt" that Putin owns stakes of 4.5 percent in Gazprom, 37 percent in Surgutneftegaz – both energy corporations — and 50 percent in Gunvor, an oil-trading company based in Zug in Switzerland and run by his close associate, Gennady Timchenko. At the time, the total value of those investments was estimated at $40 billion. Recent estimates are 50 percent higher, possibly making Putin the richest person in the world.
In other words, Putin has very good reasons to evade judicial scrutiny. He will calculate that after two back-to-back six-year terms of presidential office, everybody will have forgotten, or lost interest in his crimes — or be sufficiently well paid-off to remain silent. He then envisages pulling out of the political limelight at the age of 71, after having ruled the largest country in the world as a dictator for almost a quarter of a century. Comparisons with Stalin and Brezhnev are very much justified.
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