Dmitry Medvedev, the current top Kremlin security adviser, has recently emerged as a bellicose presence, using lengthy, hard-edged posts on the social media network Telegram to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was described as under the influence of "psychotropic substances". He said that American democracy was just as bad as the one in George Orwell's novel.
He will be deprived of ration, crushed or sent to the slaughter if someone doesn't agree. He accused Americans and their British "lackeys" of exaggerating their exceptionalism.
It has all amounted to what a Russia scholar calls "hysterical hawkishness" meant to raise the profile of the president.
He thinks he has to sound more deranged than them. He may be making himself believe it because he is a human and prone to self-justification.
At the very least, he seems to know that his new persona comes across as odd, but he doesn't seem to care. He wrote in June that people asked him why his Telegram posts were so harsh. The answer is that I don't like them very much. They are a disgrace.
In a recent post on a popular social media network, Medvedev suggested that the Kremlin had designs on two former Soviet republics. The dissolution of the Soviet Union will be corrected, according to a letter written by the president of Russia.
The post was quickly deleted, with Medvedev claiming that he was hacked, but the incident only added to the plethora of outrageously ahistorical claims and over-the-top threats that have puzzled observers who remember the once-affable Medvedev as a pro- Western moderate far more accessible than Putin.
Medvedev seems to be trying to imitate Putin in hopes of eventually succeeding him. The performance has left many in the West stunned, given how unlikely that effort is to succeed, and how much it has cost the man who used to consort with Western elites at the World Economic Forum.
He is attempting to change himself. He has become kind of a pioneer for some of the more extreme views and narratives in the Kremlin.
According to Nina Khrushcheva, an international affairs expert at the New School, Medvedev isn't smart enough to overtake his rivals for power. Even if he doesn't rule Russia again, the shows of zeal for the Ukraine war may be necessary to keep him from becoming irrelevant. She wrote to Yahoo News that he might be saying all this to make sure he is not eliminated for disloyalty.
Whatever the case, Medvedev is making his views known in a way that has been disturbing.
Even by the standards of the Putin regime, this man is completely insane.
A recent headline in Foreign Policy reflected the disappointment of a man once invested with Western hopes of reform, hoping that today, it seems like little more than fantasy. He had been described as Russia's nerd-in-chief 13 years prior.
Like Putin, an attorney by training, Medvedev is from St.Petersburg. The two met in 1990 and both served as Putin's consigliere. The interval between 2008 and 2012 would allow Putin to return as Russia's leader after a break. Putin was allowed to serve in perpetuity by changing the Russian Constitution.
The reformer some in the West had expected was never materialized, although he broke with Putin over offering support to Libya. In the same year that he was criticized for retweeting a message likening a political opponent to a "stupid sheep", Medvedev was criticized for doing the same thing. The obscene post that was deleted was blamed on a low-level tech support employee.
Alexander Navalny was the main critic of what Russia had become under Putin. Navalny released a 40-minute documentary in which he alleged that the Prime Minister had engaged in corruption. The country's prime minister, one who had labored to present a friendly image to the West, was Medvedev.
Navalny wrote in an accompanying report that he owned huge plots of land in the most elite areas, as well as managing yachts, apartments in old mansions, agricultural complexes and winery in Russia and abroad. The property was bought with loans from state banks.
The demotion of Medvedev as Russia's prime minister was caused by a loss of confidence in him by Putin. He was appointed to the Security Council when Russia invaded Ukraine.
He saw his opportunity here. He used Telegram to make the case for invading Ukraine and other things.
The frenzied Russophobia of the West will apparently never reach bottom, he wrote in his first message, as Russia's initial offensive ground to a halt and the generals and janissaries aroundPutin looked for someone to blame. He was willing to share it if he had an answer.
Four days later, in a post viewed some 938,000 times, he called Poland's leaders "political imbeciles." Concerns of a broader conflict in Eastern Europe were raised by the post, since Poland has become an epicenter of refugees fleeing the conflict in Ukraine. Poland is a NATO member and an attack on it would cause the kind of war that had been feared from the beginning. The Center for European Policy Analysis said that they should take this seriously.
In April, he mockingly contrasted the green energy vows made by Western nations to the anxieties posed by sanctions against Russian gas and oil.
There have been allegations about his personal life. He is trying to rehabilitate his image with Putin. It's not clear whether he can rise in the Kremlin again.
"I don't think it's realistic for him to think he has another shot at the presidency," says Galeotti. He is trying to cling on to some relevancy.
Online provocation is one of the ways to get attention on social media.
He wrote about the need for a lend-lease energy program lasting through the fall of 2023 to help counteract the effects of sanctions on Russian oil and gas. He wondered if there would be a Ukraine on a map in two years.
The message was seen by nearly three million people.
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