中國網站品牌欄目（頻道）
My comments:
“Seat warmer” is originally a sports term. In many team sports, such as basketball, soccer, volleyball, etc, you see a fixed number of players playing any given time during a game. Basketball, for example, is five on five, soccer eleven against eleven, while for volleyball, six vs. six.
However, teams carry more than those numbers of players, for obvious reasons, in case of injuries but more importantly they carry more players to serve as reserves, or substitutes as they’re called in games.
A basketball team for instance is allowed to carry 12 players, with only five as starters - the rest are reserves.
Or bench or seat warmers – so called because they sit mostly on the team bench as they do not get to play. They seldom leave their seat – hence warming the seat up with their body temperature.
Mr. Medvedev being merely seat warmer means, therefore, merely that he doesn’t run Russia - he occupies the seat of the President while Mr. Putin serves as Prime Minster.
Mr. Putin, these analysts suggest, is the one who calls the shots in Russia and he may return to take back the seat of the President some day.
This is democracy, Russian style.
Related stories:
Making knee-jerk changes is not in our DNA
Bury the hatchet& have an ax to grind
本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。
About the author:
Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.
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Analysts long speculated that Medvedev was merely a "seat warmer" while Putin served as Prime Minister due to constitutional restrictions.
