Russia's President and Prime Minister

Russia is a semi-presidential system, meaning executive power is formally divided between a president and a prime minister. On paper the president handles foreign policy, defense, and security, appoints the prime minister, and can dissolve parliament. The prime minister, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Duma, runs the cabinet and manages day-to-day domestic administration like the budget and economic policy. That division looks like a real power-sharing arrangement, the kind of check-and-balance you see in other semi-presidential systems like France.

In practice the prime minister is not a rival. The office exists because the president allows it to exist: the president picks the nominee, can fire the prime minister at will, and sets the political direction the cabinet follows. Running daily government business is administrative work, not independent authority. This is why Vladimir Putin's move from president to prime minister for one term, then back to president, changed almost nothing about who actually ran the country. Power had attached itself to Putin personally, through loyalty networks in the security services, state media, and United Russia, not to whichever office sat on his business card.

This matters for comparing Russia's institutions to the other five countries in the unit. A semi-presidential design is supposed to create competing centers of authority, but that only works if the legislature can act as an independent check. When one party, like United Russia, controls the Duma outright, it rubber-stamps whatever the president wants, so the formal separation of powers between president, prime minister, and parliament collapses into a single chain of command running through one person.