The Russian president Putin is modifying some of the policies his predecessor Medvedev implemented. The NYT is lamenting about that and includes this funny bit:
In a way, the biggest surprise is that Mr. Putin has found it necessary to roll back Mr. Medvedev’s initiatives in the first place.
For the four years of the “tandem” arrangement, the consensus among Western experts was that Mr. Medvedev did not do much without specific approval from Mr. Putin. On the day the two men announced they would switch places, a top Obama administration official shrugged off a query about whether this would herald a change of course in foreign policy: “Everyone knows that Putin runs Russia,” the official said.
That seems less obvious now. Mr. Putin set about reviewing or reversing a long list of policies after his inauguration: […]
All this suggests that many of Mr. Medvedev’s initiatives toward the end of his presidency, sporadic and incomplete as they were, were undertaken independently, and in some cases against Mr. Putin’s wishes.
I am no "western expert" on Russia. But compare the view of those "experts" after four years of Medvedev to my take at the beginning of Medvedev's presidency. In March 2008 I wrote:
Dmitry Medvedev ran Putin's election campaign in 1999 and was his chief of staff. He is the chair of Gazprom's board of directors since 2000 and First Deputy Prime Minister since 2005. He was "Person of the Year" of the Russian equivalent to Time in 2005. […]
Medvedev is a small man, 5'4'' or 162 cm – not the supersized format of a "western" manager. But he is young and a very fit sportsman. People who underestimate him and suspect that he is only a Putin puppet are in for some serious surprises.
Why are those experts called experts when it took them until after Medvedev's presidency to see what I could see at its very beginning? An independent man that was a partner but not puppet of Vladimir Putin.
The most serious surprise for the "western experts" was Medvedev's fast decision in August 2008 to react with force against the Georgian attack on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia. Something that did not surprise me at all. But even after that had happened those "experts" still thought of Medvedev as the Putin puppet he never was. Only now do they start to understand him.
Tell me, why are those experts still listened to?