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“A campaign of insinuation and insult has targeted Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and in a country where all power flows from the top downward, his boss, President Vladimir Putin, has done nothing all winter to stop it,” says an article in The Washington Post. 

“Medvedev’s failings get an airing in the press, and nasty, anonymous video documentaries accuse him of all sorts of treachery. Slights and humiliations are visited on him by the Kremlin, seat of the presidential apparatus. Governors go around him. Bureaucrats ignore him. Putin, in public, takes little care to hide his disdain.

Medvedev responds by repeatedly trying to demonstrate his loyalty to Putin, which draws ridicule from politicians and pundits alike,” says the article.

The Kremlin could halt the abuse any time it wanted to, said Lilia Shevtsova of the Moscow Carnegie Center. But Putin, she said, intends to send a clear message to the rest of his circle that Medvedev is irrevocably out of favor. And it is a symptom of one of Putin’s strongest characteristics, she added: “He enjoys it when other people are being hurt.”

“He can despise Medvedev, he can walk him around like a lap dog, he can condescend to him — but he cannot just brush him aside,” Shevtsova said. “That would undermine the tightness of the gang.”

“Putin is becoming a nuisance to the elite,” Shevtsova said. “At some point, he will have to use force and coercion. That is the logic of the reign. But he’s not ready. He’s not Stalin.”