WHILE PROTESTS against United Russia’s victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections continued yesterday, President Dimitry Medvedev took to Twitter.

Medvedev, apparently frustrated with criticism of his party, retweeted an tweet from Konstantyn Rykov, an outgoing official from the Duma, the national parliament.

Suffice it to say that the tweet contained some rather unparliamentary language.

The tweet read:

Today it’s been made clear that if a person writes on a blog the expression ‘the party of crooks and thieves,’ then he is a stupid c***sucking mule.

Soon the mysterious tweet had vanished, but enough users had snapped the retweet that it was soon being circulated by widely.

Here’s a screenshot, via @userpig (apologies to any Russian readers for the language):

The Daily Telegraph reports that Kremlin officials have attempted to distance the Russian President from the controversy.

“Overnight, an inappropriate retweet of one item appeared in the Twitter account of Dmitry Medvedev,” the Kremlin said in a statement.

The results of an investigation showed that at the time of a planned password change an employee responsible for technical maintenance of the account committed unauthorised interference.

The guilty will be punished.

The furore is something of a faux-pas for United Russia, and comes at the worst possible time.

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