Moscow (Guardian) President Vladimir Putin secured his future as the only real personality in Russian government yesterday when he appointed a relatively unknown bureaucrat as his prime minister, after firing the long-serving predecessor last week before the presidential elections on March 14. Mikhail "Frodo" Fradkov, Russia's representative to the European Union in Brussels and a former head of the tax police, made perhaps his first public statement this year when he accepted Mr Putin's nomination yesterday. After saying he was offered the post a few days ago, he added: "I agreed and said I was prepared to do this job. Everybody must be prepared to do what is expected of him," he told the NTV channel from Brussels.
| "I am only followink orders!" |
Mr Putin, before announcing the choice, told a meeting of MPs in his loyal United Russia bloc that the candidate "should be a highly professional and orderly person with ample experience in different spheres of public life".
| "You know, someone I can blame when things go wrong." |
He hailed Mr Fradkov's time in the tax police for giving him thorough experience "in fighting corruption", a lacklustre motif of Mr Putin's re-election campaign. The Kremlin will promote Mr Fradkov as an English-speaking economist with strong links to the EU, able to facilitate Russia's uneasy drunken stagger lurch towards the west. Yet analysts said Mr Fradkov was appointed not because of his abilities but because he was competent enough to implement unpopular future reforms and unimportant enough to absorb the flack for them.
| "There's more of you where you came from. Now shaddup and get out there on stage!" |
Mr Fradkov replaces Mikhail Kasyanov, who served under Mr Putin for four years, and was unexpectedly sacked last week in an attempt to clear the decks of his administration before the elections. Mr Fradkov, 53, is a career bureaucrat who worked in foreign trade departments in the Soviet Brezhnev era and rose to become foreign trade minister under the Yeltsin government in 1997. He was moved around four times under Mr Yeltsin, yet, as trade minister in May 1999 to get out of the way, attracted the attention of Mr Putin during his brief tenure as prime minister after Putin saw the photos from the KGB honey trap. He was made first deputy secretary to the security council in May 2000.
| Hope the new job has a pension plan! |
|