On January 16, Medvedev was appointed deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo: IANS)
Russian President Vladimir Putin has revealed that he had notified former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev about the government’s resignation beforehand, according to the media report on Thursday.
During an interview with the TASS News, President Putin said, “We have enjoyed very frank, collegial, friendly relations with Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev for many years. We have no secrets from one another. So we discussed this issue with him”.
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“We had discussed it earlier and he knew what was going on”, the Russain President further added.
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Putin also ruled out speculations that the Cabinet’s resignation looked like a “special operation”.
On January 15, following President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly, Dmitry Medvedev announced his government’s resignation, TASS News reported.
He said it was the right step to take against the background of the president’s proposals for amending the Constitution.
On January 16, Medvedev was appointed deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.
Mikhail Mishustin, the former head of the Federal Tax Service, took over the reins as Russia’s new head of government.
On Tuesday, Putin sacked Vladislav Surkov, one of his chief advisers and the architect of Russia’s Ukraine policy who was viewed among the country’s most powerful men.
In recent years, Surkov was in charge of the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy and cultivated close ties with the separatists who have carved out “people’s republics” in the ex-Soviet country’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
In 2013, he returned to the Kremlin where he served as Putin’s advisor in charge of Russia’s ties with Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed de-escalation of the Syrian crisis, saying Russian-Turkish agreements should be implemented in full.
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