It’s a long time since Dmitry Medvedev was last considered a potential liberal hope for Russia. Most recently, after all, he has threatened to bomb any country that seeks to apply the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) recent arrest warrant on Vladimir Putin and separately read a working group of the Military Industrial Commission a 1941 telegram from Stalin that threatened anyone who failed to meet their targets with being ‘smashing as criminals who disregard the honour and interests of the homeland’.