Is this Luzhkov's Foros?

As Moscow’s once indestructible mayor flees on a hastily arranged trip to Austria, the question is less will he accept defeat like Gorbachev did following his 1991 detention in his Crimean dacha but will he even be allowed to return home?

“Churchill once remarked that observing a Russian power-struggle ‘is like watching two dogs fighting under a carpet,’”, writes Fred Weir, “and little appears to have changed since his day”. However, it does seem that the Luzhkov drama is a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ scenario for Putin.

By pitting  Medvedev against the strongest independent politician in the country and staying above the fray, Putin can take care of two major rivals with one stone.

If Medvedev is unable to topple a Luzhkov determined to hold on to his fiefdom, then Putin can either sack the mayor himself and show both who’s boss, or offer Medvedev clemency in exchange for a pledge of loyalty against the President in the 2012 race.  Even someone like Putin would find it had to win in 2012 without Moscow’s support.

And even if Medvedev does manage to remove Luzhkov, he will have done Putin’s dirty work for him, and like emerge much weakened from the battle himself.

However, there is also the outside possibility that Medvedev could use a successful ouster of Luzhkov as his version of Putin’s 1999 Chechnya campaign – establishing the necessary credentials to step out of his predecessor’s shadow.

Two things are certain:

1: the markets are trembling. Reuters reports that “speculation over his fate caused the prices of Eurobonds issued by Bank of Moscow to fall to their lowest levels in almost two months, while The Wall Street Journal writes that “if [the Luzhkovs] are forced to leave the country, traders fear they might try to liquidate their Russian assets—adding to the current gloom over the ruble”.

and 2: as Carnegie’s Nikolai Petrov tells Weir, Russia still has no effective mechanism for regulating such elite conflicts” and that “no matter who wins, this spectacle hurts authority and diminishes public respect for all politicians.”