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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.
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本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。
About the author:
Zhang Xin（张欣） 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.
Analysts long speculated that Medvedev was merely a "seat warmer" while Putin served as Prime Minister due to constitutional restrictions.
