The wife of Moscow's embattled mayor Yury Luzhkov says the recent media smear campaign against him reveals mounting tensions within the Kremlin ahead of the 2012 presidential polls.
"There are people in the presidential administration who fear that as the election gets closer, the mayor may not take the position of President [Dmitry] Medvedev but of Premier [Vladimir] Putin," Yelena Baturina said in an interview with the New Times magazine.
Baturina said she didn't understand why "the country's leaders pretend there is nothing going on," as Putin, the mayor's powerful patron, remains silent.
Luzhkov resumed his vacation and went back to Austria for another week on Sunday, but analysts say he is only taking time out to see what the Kremlin does next.
State-controlled media carried out an extraordinary 1990s-style hatchet job on Luzhkov in September, with TV channels portraying Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor since 1992, as an obtuse, money-loving apparatchik, who relaxed in Austria during this summer's smog crisis and spent more money on his bees than the smog-affected Muscovites. Attacks on senior politicians by state media have been extremely rare in the last decade.
RIA Novosti
