Barack Obama was pretty slick when he gave Hillary Clinton a Cabinet gig, but it's hard to top Vladimir Putin's latest hire when it comes to co-opting a political rival. The Russian prime minister recently appointed as a regional governor Nikita Y. Belykh, a leading liberal critic of Putin's regime who had grown tired of his movement's ineffectiveness. "When you have nothing at all, when you cannot even get close in the elections, when all your paths are being cut off, then you just can’t have a political party,” Belykh said.
Read it at The New York Times
