Interview: Dimitry Medvedev
'I'm a young president, don't try to label me'
Russian leader keen to get down to business with west after two months in office
By Jonathan Steele in Moscow - The Guardian, Thursday 3 July 2008
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's new president, will be the youngest world leader at next week's G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan. Aged 42, he has been in office for just two months. But in a lengthy interview in the Kremlin this week he presented himself as a man of "colossal experience" by contrast with the two US presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama.
In a put-down that managed to sound gracious, he said: "I sympathise with my American colleagues. It often happens that a person is elected president who has, let's say, very serious experience in Congress or the House of Representatives but doesn't know how the executive branch works.
"Of course you can learn. Why do I say this? Because for the last few years I've worked in the executive branch in the presidential hierarchy and this has given me colossal experience."
Asked about McCain's comment two years ago that Russia should be thrown out of the G8 because of its poor human rights record, Medvedev brushed it aside as "not serious". The G8 was not created because countries liked each other but because of the world's economic problems, he said. "Any US administration, if it wants to be successful, including in getting over the current depression in the American economy, has to conduct a pragmatic policy at home and abroad," he said.
Unlike his predecessor Vladimir Putin, who spent his early career in the KGB, Medvedev was a lawyer in St Petersburg before becoming a local government official there under Putin. He was promoted to head the gas giant Gazprom while still in his 30s. But like Putin, Medvedev is a short man with little charisma. He entered the room briskly, shook hands with barely a trace of a smile, and got down to business.
Asked whether he was a liberal (ie more "western" than Putin), he said: "I've never tried to measure myself on any scale. A person is more multifaceted than the label they often get stuck with. On the other hand someone's whole behaviour allows you to characterise them in a certain way. This person has liberal convictions, that person has conservative ones, this person is a radical socialist, and so on.
"Considering I'm a young president, I wouldn't like to make an evaluation of myself. It's not my job to do that. But I do have a certain basic set of values which have been fundamental for me since my time at university. I've always started from the position that you have to obey the law and respect the supremacy of the laws which parliament passes. It's vital to fight against contempt of the law, against any legal nihilism. The economy must be based on market values. There must be unconditional defence of property rights. These are the principles I took on as a student, just as there are other values like human rights which must be protected unconditionally in any state activity."
On the west's recognition of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence, he said: "We consider Kosovo as a dangerous and unfortunate precedent. Europe will pay for it for decades. It's obvious that a whole host of other separatist regimes will exploit it to justify their own desire for legal status."
He took issue with Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, for making a statement in support of the EU's decision to replace Kosovo's UN administration with an EU presence. "At a minimum these are decisions which the secretary-general must not take on his own. They must be taken by the security council. And it's quite strange when the security council hasn't made any pronouncement but the secretary general speaks out on the issue".
On Iran, he attacked the EU for increasing sanctions against Tehran by freezing the assets of Iran's main foreign bank just when talks were moving forward. "If we're talking to them, then we shouldn't take actions that excite the Iranian leadership and are designed to lead to additional sanctions. I just don't understand why the EU took this recent action. I mentioned this to [European commission president José Manuel] Barroso and [EU foreign policy supremo Javier] Solana at the EU-Russia summit last week. Either we talk to them or we try to criticise them on any pretext," he insisted.
On world economic problems, which will dominate next week's meeting between Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the US, Medvedev wants "new economic mechanisms". "It's clear that institutions created in the 70s and 60s, and a number of structures that are the key players, are failing to cope with the problems. So there are various ideas aimed at adjusting the world's financial system.
"First of all it must be fairer and take into account the set of risks which are relevant today. It must take into consideration the negative experience connected with overheating in the world economy as a whole and the economies of individual countries. It must take into account the negative experience connected with the mortgage crisis which didn't only affect the United States ... there were problems in other countries too. In short, the system must be remodelled to fit today's world.
"We have to formulate proposals and start negotiation to discuss what shape this system could take. A number of countries are preparing these proposals, Great Britain among them. We are also preparing proposals ... it does not mean demolishing the architecture created over decades. But the fact that it has to be improved and be more up-to-date, and better protected from risks, that it must not suffer from national egoism, financial and economic egoism, but must be fairer towards other countries - this is absolutely clear."
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