TR1 wrote:Rogozin is a moron, that's the issue.
Medvedev is Putin's man in any case, no difference who was up there.
I think Putin and the rest of them are scum, but Rogozin's issue is not that he is a thief (at least doesn't appear to be). He is just a completely simpleton.
That's pure supposition, in reality Medvedev handled Libya and relations with Washington with the exact opposite approach. Putin wanted to distance Russia from the Washington Consensus, while Medvedev wanted to embrace it with hamburger diplomacy. Putin militantly opposed the attack on Libya, while Medvedev capitulated and allowed NATO to attack. Let's not forget Georgia attacked Russia with instruction from NATO under the presidency of Medvedev, that was NATO saying out loud that they thought Medvedev was a pushover, that's something NATO would never have done under Putin. Had Putin not been in the background, Medvedev would have been Boris Yeltsin 2.0, probably granting NATO bases on Russian soil. In Western media circles Putin is a victim of a 24/7/365 campaign attacking him for putting a billionaire behind bars for tax evasion (something America should mimic), for recognizing that under the cover of an attack on Iran NATO was setting up a first-strike capability against Russia (ABM bases in Poland), and for not tolerating Islamic extremists attacking schools of children, which were all rational responses.
You don't have to like Putin, the reality is that he's by far the best leader in the world since Franklin Delano Roosevelt from a empirical point of view. With the help of Segey Lavrov, Putin successfully embarrassed and defeated NATO strategy to kick Russia out of the Middle-East (an attack on Syria), and even re-kindled the relationship with Egypt.
Another one of Putin's major successes was how he turned a powerful enemy in to a powerful ally. Putin can be credited with turning a former enemy of Russia (The Peoples Republic of China) to a friend, and it's an ideal alliance because neither party is subservient to another (unlike NATO), and it's both an economic and military alliance. China is becoming a growing super power, and is dependent of Russia on natural resources and raw materials on a economic level, as well as dependent on Russia militarily with growing need for Russian assistance on designing military vehicles (WZ-10, J-20, J-11, jet engines, etc.), on both fronts to a tune of tens of billions of dollars. If China were ever dumb enough to attack Russia, many of the PRC's military designs would be compromised and Russia could counter effectively, and they would be cut off from the natural resources that they desperately need, so the likeliness of China becoming an enemy again is slim-to-none. The alliance is against the common enemy called NATO, and Russia is more than willing to accept tens of billions of USD for another oil customer, in case the European Union wrecks the South/Nord stream pipeline.