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incompetence
Russian foreign policy is so bad that they have managed to alienate even naturally pro-Russian government such as the Lukashenko post-Communist tyranny in Belarus and the supposedly pro-Russian Yushkhovich government in Ukraine. The Chinese look at them with obvious distrust (their recent project of an Asiatic-European bullet train network deliberately avoids Russia, actually choosing the politically unstable and physically earthquake-prone territories of Iran and Turkey). The Putin-Medvedev government is increasingly proving a complete failure.
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Everything is relative. While not wishing to minimise Russia's distress, Mr Rudd is presiding over an utter disaster when you consider what he started with and what he has turned his situation into. The man is floundering, and everything he does seems to make the situation worse. And unlike Putin and Medvedev, who preside over a nation which is used to dictatorship and endemic corruption, he can only take strongarm tactics so far before he's sacked a la Whitlam in 1975 - and unlike his idol, I suspect his party would not forgive him sufficiently to allow him to contest the election that would follow.
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Whitlam threatened to find a way to govern without the Senate (or refused to call an election, which adds up to the same thing), at which point the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, removed him for unconstitutional conduct and installed the leader of the Opposition Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister - on the condition that he immediately pass the money bills and call a general election, and nothing else. This he did, and Fraser handily won that election, running against Whitlam (who had not been removed as leader of the Labor Party but specifically and only had his commission as PM terminated and whose eligibility to stand as contender for the next election was unimpeded).
Rudd's steady slide from grace began with the second passage of the "Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme" bill before the Senate. He badly wanted a cap-and-trade scheme in hand before the Copenhagen conference but he faced the obstacle of the Greens and the Coalition (Liberal/National) in the Senate having the numbers to bury it. The Greens wanted to bury it because his scheme didn't go far enough; many in the Liberal Party wanted to bury it either because they were skeptical about the anthropogenic nature of global warming (as I am) or because they didn't think an ETS would work (neither do I), or both. The then-Liberal leader was in favour and behaved as if he had the entire Party behind him, which he didn't. He was promptly deposed by the narrowest margin and although he and two others crossed the floor to vote for it, the rest of the Coalition and the Greens held firm and the bill failed.
Because this was its second failure, Rudd had a constitutional right to ask for a double-dissolution of both houses (normally an election here is Lower House and half-senate) in order to try to get it through (as Whitlam had done in order to pass Australia's nationalised health service in 1974), and had threatened the Opposition with this if it obstructed him. On the change of leader, however, Rudd backed down.
Ever since then, the Opposition has been substantially more effective and Rudd has looked to scheme after scheme to divert attention from whatever has gone wrong before. The problem is that every such scheme has been increasingly hastily and poorly implemented, with less and less cross-talk with his Cabinet colleagues, and it became clear that whatever dirt he might fling at his opponent (a Catholic ex-seminarian), the government under his leadership was doomed to failure in the impending general election. Hence his removal today.
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His worst failing was inability to delegate. Many of his ministers appeared to be nothing more than sock-puppets, and our new Prime Minister, Gillard, states that one of her biggest problems was that he simply wasn't listening to her - or to anyone else. That may exculpate her to a degree from the horrendous failure in her own education portfolio, or it may not. The outward appearance from my perspective is of a deputy who didn't stand up to her boss the way Abbott and Co. eventually stood up to Turnbull over the ETS business, and makes me wonder if all we've got is more of the same.
I hope not, because she seems intelligent and competent in her own right; and it'd be a shame for our first female PM to be no more than a puppet on the strings of a bunch of thuggish trade union-derived powerbrokers who cut her predecessor down for her.