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Amid speculation Putin may stand for Russian presidency again, some claim ‘rift’ staged to hide lack of real opposition Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia, has promised to reveal soon whether he will run for a second term, saying at his first major press conference that “silence cannot last forever” on the subject. There had been intense speculation that Medvedev would use the conference on Wednesday to give a strong signal on whether he or his ally, Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, will stand in elections to the presidency next March. Moscow is thick with rumours that there is friction between the two men over who should stand, although some analysts think the ruling elite is promoting talk of a rift to hide the lack of true political competition in Russia. Medvedev, 45, refused to say which of the pair would be a candidate, but indicated he would make his intentions known in the near future. “You can expect an announcement soon,” he told more than 800 journalists in an auditorium at the Skolkovo business school near Moscow. In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session, which seemed tailored to boost his ratings in an election campaign, Medvedev said Putin, 57, was his close ally. However, he made remarks which set him apart from his mentor. Asked if the release of the jailed oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, would present a danger to society, he replied: “Absolutely no danger at all,” in marked contrast to Putin’s statement about the businessman in December that “a thief should sit in jail”. When he came to power in 2008, Medvedev said that he preferred meetings with small numbers of journalists. Then he abruptly announced last month that he would hold his first large-scale televised news conference, something that Putin did annually as president. The decision came after Putin gave a bravura performance in his annual prime-ministerial speech to parliament on 20 April, which contained a raft of social measures and was seen as a pitch for his own return to the presidency. Medvedev’s two-and-a-quarter-hour conference followed the Putin mould: Hundreds of Russian journalists waved signs with the names of their regions and pleaded to pose a question. One woman held up a sheet of paper with a red love heart drawn on it. Several reporters prefaced their queries with adulatory waffle about the president, and a correspondent from the Arctic in a traditional felt jacket asked about the prospects for reindeer herders. Asked about Moscow’s relations with Nato, Medvedev said they were “not the worst” and “a lot of water has flowed under the bridge” since the two clashed over the war in Georgia in 2008. However, he sent a warning to the US not to push ahead with a missile defence system in eastern Europe without including Russia as a partner. “If we don’t work out a model of co-operation on missile defence then we [Russia] will have to take measures in response and then we’re talking about speeding up the development of nuclear strike potential,” he said. ‘That would be a very bad scenario that would throw us back to the cold war epoch.” Medvedev seemed assured as he answered questions and repeatedly stressed his passion for Russia’s modernisation, but he lacked Putin’s salty phrases and demagogic touch. Putin sent a subtle reminder of his superior image with the publication of an interview in Outdoor Life, a US magazine, in which he discussed his macho photo shoots. He dismissed suggestions that a US leader would not pose with a bare chest or a weapon. He said Theodore Roosevelt had been pictured with a lion he shot, and Barack Obama was filmed bathing in the Pacific last year when he was “not wearing a tie, to put it mildly”. Dmitry Medvedev Russia Europe Vladimir Putin Tom Parfitt guardian.co.uk