President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday launched an unprecedented attack on the party that has dominated Russian politics for the last decade, saying the country was becoming stuck in political stagnation.

United Russia – whose overall leader is Prime Minister and Mr Medvedev’s Kremlin predecessor Vladimir Putin – has held an overwhelming majority in Parliament since its creation and has squeezed out the liberal opposition.

“If the ruling party has no chance of ever losing anywhere, it eventually ‘bronzes over’ and also degrades, just like any other living organism that does not move,” Mr Medvedev said in a video blog address.

Mr Medvedev blamed United Russia for dominating television air and receiving a number of other important advantages from federal and local election officials.

His comments came ahead of a major policy address the Kremlin chief will deliver to the two houses of Parliament on Tuesday – a speech that will be read closely for signs of whether Mr Medvedev plans to stand for re-election in 2012.

Mr Medvedev warned Russia was already becoming stuck in the political stagnation that Russians remember in the last decades of the Soviet Union.

“At a certain point, our political life started showing symptoms of stagnation,” he said in the video blog, which he periodically records as part of an effort to appear more approachable to the Russian public.

“And this stagnation is equally damaging to both the ruling party and the opposition forces.” The Russian word for stagnation is often used by historians to describe the political drift that the Soviet Union experienced in the latter years of Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership – a period when the country’s status as a superpower began to wane.

But Russia’s liberals – who are sidelined to the point of having no representation in Parliament – have long accused Mr Medvedev of failing to match his ambitious rhetoric with concrete actions to improve democracy.

“This is not the first time that Dmitry Medvedev – who has made Russia’s modernisation into a top concern of his presidency – has talked about the need to refresh Russia’s political life,” the independent NEWSru.com website remarked.