Democracy, managed

(My article below is now online - with a vibrant comments section - at The Globe and Mail)

Saturday afternoon, at a political rally in Moscow's Luzhniki Sports Palace, Russia's two-decade experiment with democracy came to an end. A different, more authoritarian, system with only a mirage of choice, is now firmly in place.

Russia's new political model is often called Putinism, after the man who built it and who will soon return as its unequivocal head. Elections are still to be held, and Putinism is far freer in most aspects than the totalitarianism that Russians lived under for most of the Soviet era. But it is a one-man show, completely dominated by Vladimir Putin, the man who served as Russia's president from 2000 to 2008, and who is now primed to return to the Kremlin after a token four years as prime minister.

Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime Putin aide who was drafted into the presidency in 2008 (when Mr. Putin stepped aside in deference to an annoying clause in the post-Soviet constitution that limits presidents to a maximum of two consecutive terms) told a gathering of the dominant United Russia party on Saturday that Mr. Putin should be their nominee in the presidential election scheduled for next March.

"I think it would be correct for the congress to support the candidacy of the party chairman, Vladimir Putin, to the post of president of the country," a stoic Mr. Medvedev said. Mr. Putin quickly accepted, and said it would be "a great honour" to take his old job back.

The announcement brought an end to hopes that Mr. Medvedev, who had shown a slightly more liberal side than Mr. Putin and who had occasionally flashed a willingness to challenge his former boss, would stand against Mr. Putin next spring and give Russians a real choice. In recent months, Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin had both fed speculation about a head-to-head race by refusing to answer questions about which of them would run for the presidency.

Instead, Mr. Medvedev - at Mr. Putin's suggestion - agreed to lead United Russia into December's parliamentary election, putting him on track to switch jobs with Mr. Putin and become prime minister. Mr. Putin told the party congress that the decision had been made "a long time ago, several years back."

The game of musical chairs will only affirm what most Russians believed about Medvedev's time in the Kremlin: the real power remained with Mr. Putin throughout, even while in the nominal No. 2 job.

(A key part of Mr. Medvedev's legacy is a constitutional change extending presidential terms from four to six years, starting with the 2012 election. The change makes it possible for Mr. Putin, 58, to remain Russia's president until he's 70.)

Other parties will contest the Duma elections in December and the Kremlin will ensure that other candidates will be found to run against Mr. Putin in the spring. The appearance of choice is an important facet of Putinism, or "managed democracy," as the system's creators prefer to call it.

But those other parties and candidates will face a host of obstacles - ranging from the Kremlin's near-complete control of the media to physical intimidation and ballot-stuffing - that will make an electoral upset close to impossible. As the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch now serving his seventh year in a Siberian prison, and Anna Politkovskaya, the Kremlin critic who was murdered for her investigative journalism in 2006, have made all too clear, there's no tolerance for genuine threats to the system.

Ten days ago, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov - one of the last figures who could have made Russia's election season somewhat interesting - bowed out in disgust, withdrawing as a candidate for a Kremlin-backed opposition group (another unique feature of Putinism). "We have a puppeteer in the country, who long ago privatized the political system," Mr. Prokhorov said, in remarks taken to refer to Vladislav Surkov, a political strategist who remained a key figure in both the Putin and Medvedev presidencies.

Few Russians seem to mind. Aided by national media he hammered into submission after coming to office, Mr. Putin - who has been shown on state television fighting forest fires, tracking tigers and flying fighter jets - is easily the country's most popular politician, credited with stabilizing the country's economy (which remains heavily reliant on energy exports) and restoring its international prestige, in part via the 2008 war against neighbouring Georgia, a former vassal.

Western-style democracy, which the country briefly experienced in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was president, is associated with corruption, lawlessness and economic collapse.

The man who oversaw the end of the Soviet Union has warned that Russia is headed for disaster if Mr. Putin and his coterie insisted on clinging to power.

"The unwillingness to start reform or the desire to have partial change is often explained by the fear of losing power and the desire to prevent a new collapse of Russia," Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in an article carried this week by two Russian newspapers. "But it is the very absence of change which threatens to provoke instability and put the future of the country in question."

Dima and Volodya look East

Amidst all the commentary about the inauguration of President Dmitriy Medvedev and his boss/subordinate Prime Minister (as of a few minutes ago) Vladimir Putin, the bit that struck me as most interesting was President Dima's announcement that he would head east on his first foreign trip, to Kazakhstan and China.

It makes sense. Arguably no country has closer ties with the Kremlin than Nursultan Nazarbayev's Kazakhstan, something that was plain to all of us who took part in the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty last month - where the few Westerners in the room were repeatedly scolded by a crowd that clearly shared the Kremlin's worldview. Meanwhile, Russia and China have rapidly expanding trade, and last year conducted a large-scale joint military operation. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization looks increasingly like it could be the authoritarian east's military answer to NATO.

There are few places where President Dima would get a warmer reception than Astana and Beijing.

Still, it's worth recalling here that eight years ago, the newly inaugurated and "westward-looking" President Putin chose the United Kingdom for his first trip (after a brief and telling stop in Belarus). Back then, he was accorded the red-carpet treatment by someone named Tony Blair, and was famously received by Queen Elizabeth II.

Eight years on, the dream of Russia joining the West appears dead - buried by Chechnya, NATO expansion, Kosovo, colour revolutions, missile defense and the Alexander Litvinenko saga.

So Dima and Volodya are looking the other way for friends.

Why the Kremlin is pulling for Hillary

Who do Russians want to see in the White House? What do the looming changes in leadership, both in Moscow and Washington, likely mean for the increasingly confrontational relatioship between the Kremlin and the West?

Both questions were put to me by an astute and concerned audience in London this week who came out to hear me chat about The New Cold War during a pleasant night at The Gallery in Farringdon. Both issues will again be hotly debated at the Eurasian Media Forum, which begins tomorrow here in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The short answer to the first question is that none of the remaining U.S. presidential contenders are particularly palatable to the Kremlin.

Broadly speaking, most Russians would prefer to see a Democrat in the White House. But neither Hillary Clinton nor Barrack Obama comes without baggage on the Russia front.

Clinton, who would likely win the Russia primary if the world were given a chance to vote, reminds Russians, of course, of her husband Bill's era. While Mr. Clinton was personally popular - his extramarital shenanigans played much better in laissez-faire Russia than they did back home - Russians also harbour resentment at him for the way he ignored Moscow's concerns during the last Kosovo crisis and the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia.

Ms. Clinton also embarrassed herself when she tried, and failed, repeatedly to remember the name of Russia's president-elect ("Meh, uh, Medevedeva - whatever"). Like presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, Clinton has dismissed Medvedev on the campaign trail as a Putin puppet and been harsh in her condemnation of Russia's sitting president, saying that as a KGB agent, Putin "by definition he doesn’t have a soul."

Harsh words that will hardly serve to defrost relations if Clinton suprises pundits and manages to win the presidency. But to the Kremlin, she's someone they feel they know and understand - thereby easier to deal with than either Barrack Obama or John McCain.

It's not just the Kremlin - an opinion poll conducted in February by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (better known by its Russian acronym, VTsIOM) found that if they were given a chance to vote in the Democratic primary, Russians would choose Clinton over Obama by a nearly five-to-one margin.

Part of that, sadly, can likely be chalked up to rampant racism in Russian society. Very few Russians could fathom a chorniy, a black, being the most powerful person on the planet.

Obama has actually said little about what his Russia policy might be, but we can draw conclusions from the company he's decided to keep. His top Russia advisor is Michael McFaul, a respected Stanford University academic and a harsh critic of both Vladimir Putin and the system of "managed democracy" the Kremlin has installed over the past eight years.

On the other hand, he's called for Russia to be included in NATO as a way of resolving trans-Atlantic tension. On that point, I think he's ahead of his time.

More ominous, to many Russians, is the presence of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor, on Obama's foreign policy team. Brzezinski is an Old Cold Warrior who was among the first to call for the West to confront Putin. He also played a key role in both promoting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (which expensively serves the sole purpose of getting Caspian Sea crude to markets in the West without ever crossing Russian soil) and in rallying diplomatic support for Ukraine's pro-Western Orange Revolution in 2004.

But even the presence of Brzezinski doesn't mean Obama will necessarily abandon his pledge to be a less confrontational U.S. president than the outgoing George W. Bush. In fact, both Democrats have made clear that they favour diplomacy over confrontation when it comes to Russia.

John McCain promises to take the opposite tack. In fact, he's frequently been critical of the Bush Administration for being too soft on Russia.

“I looked into Putin’s eyes, and I saw three things, a “K’ a “G’ and a “B,’” is a line McCain has pulled out more than once during his push for the presidency. It's a pointed jab at Bush's palsy relationship with Putin, and Bush's famous remark after his first meeting with the Russian leader that after looking in Putin's eyes he "got a sense of his soul."

While in the Senate, McCain was the most outspoken U.S. politician in calling for the West to confront Putin and Putinism. He also headed the USAid-funded International Republican Institute at a time when it played a key background role supporting both the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and Ukraine's popular uprising a year later. (That's him in the picture with buddy Joe Lieberman sporting orange scarves during the Orange Revolution. Hillary seems to have forgotten hers. At least she's not wearing blue...)

McCain, who has called for Russia to be expelled from the G-8, was charateristically harsh after Medvedev handily won the March 2 presidential elections:

"In an election that was uncontested, where opposition candidates were either suppressed or arrested, where the result was foreordained by the manipulations of a corrupt and undemocratic regime, the one thing that was never in doubt was the result. It is a tragedy of history that at this moment, when the democratic tide has reached more nations than ever before, the Russian people be again deprived of the opportunity to choose their leaders in a free and open contest," McCain said in the statement.

"It is obviously an election that did not pass the smell test … These elections were clearly rigged."

Can't argue with much of that. But you have to wonder how that first McCain-Medvedev summit would go. The Moscow News suggests that a McCain presidency would mean "the end of U.S.-Russian diplomatic niceties."

(As an aside, McCain's speechwriter is Robert Kagan, one of the architects of the argument for invading Iraq. How do these people manage to stick around after being so monumentally, disastrously, wrong?)

So the Kremlin, if it had a ballot, would vote for Hillary, and would take Obama over McCain.

The other side of the equation, of course, is Medvedev. What kind of president would he be, and how might he alter the course of Russian-American relations?

Analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, who I have a lot of respect for, believes that the fact Medvedev was chosen to succeed Putin over the more hawkish Sergei Ivanov, means that "we have reached the end of the latest negative confrontational cycle."

I'm less sure. It seems to me that Putin - who in addition to becoming Medvedev's prime minister has "agreed" to take over the leadership of the United Russia party - has now made it abundantly clear that he will remain the real authority. Medvedev's reported pro-Western bent will mean nothing if Putin and the siloviki are maintaining control of foreign and defense policy as the Vedomosti newspaper recently speculated.

Gleb Pavlovsky, who as one of the architects of managed democracy is in a position to know, suggested that the new Russian power system will be a trifecta of the presidency, the parliament and the cabinet of ministers. I don't think it escaped him that Putin controls two of those three power centres to Medvedev's one.

So the odds are that, no matter who wins the White House, we'll see the same escalating confrontationalism that has marked the past eight years.

Incidentally, I'm sharing the stage with both Brzezinski and Pavlovsky tomorrow morning at the Eurasian Media Forum. I'll let you know if I get a word in edgewise...

A crucial summit in Romania

Leaders of the 26 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have just arrived in Bucharest, for what may prove to be one of most important summit meetings the alliance has held since the end of the Cold War.

What the debate should be focused on is NATO's ongoing mission in Afghanistan, which currently lacks the men and equipment it needs to succeed. Canada - which has 2,500 soldiers deployed in the volatile, Taliban-friendly Kandahar region - has borne a disproportionate share of the fighting and the casualties thus far, and has threatened to withdraw its forces unless other alliance members step up and contribute an extra 1,000 troops, as well as additional drones and helicopters.

So far, no member nation has stepped up and offered the needed forces, raising the possibility that the NATO alliance may be sliding towards ignominious defeat in the Afghan mountains, just as the Soviet Union did 20 years ago.

But as crucial as the Afghan debate is to the alliance's future, the war against the Taliban is not even the top item on NATO's agenda. Instead, the wobbling alliance is debating the merits of taking on Ukraine and Georgia as new members. (U.S. President George W. Bush continues to praise the idea, while France and Germany have wisely made their opposition plain.)

Adding the two ex-Soviet states to NATO is dangerous for many reasons. First and foremost is the possibility that it could put the alliance on a military collision course with Russia over the future of two breakaway regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

As I've written before, the West's poorly examined decision to back independence for Kosovo has heartened the Moscow-backed separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, pushing them closer to their own unilateral declarations of independence. If the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians choose to follow Kosovo's path, look for Russia (and Serbia) to quickly support them and for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to threaten military measures to keep his country together.

If that happens today (which it could), the crisis could be defused by international mediation, even if a few shots are fired. But if a fragmented Georgia is made a NATO member before Abkhazia and South Ossetia are brought back into the fold, any standoff between Tbilisi and the separatists suddenly becomes a crisis between Moscow and the West that could have serious implications.

Former British defense secretary Malcolm Rifkind put it succinctly in an opinion piece published in today's London Telegraph:

If Ukraine or Georgia become full members, Britain and other members could find themselves required to contemplate war or other forms of military intervention if either of these countries faced armed attack.

This cannot be considered a hypothetical concern. For some years, Georgia has been unable to enjoy full territorial integrity because of the de facto secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Both secessionist regions enjoy strong Russian support and there have already been clashes between Georgian troops and those of the two breakaway regions.

Would it really be wise for Nato member states to accept a legal obligation, not just an option, to come to the aid of Georgia if either or both of these secessionist regimes, with or without the support of Moscow, continued to use armed force against the Georgian government?

There are similar reasons to tell Ukraine that now is not the time for it to join NATO either. Not only is the Kremlin even more heatedly opposed to seeing Ukraine join NATO than it is Georgia (President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly raised the possibility of targeting its neighbour with nuclear weapons if Kyiv joins), most Ukrainians are themselves either opposed or indifferent to the alliance, raising the possibility of further internal strife if President Viktor Yushchenko pushes ahead without public opinion fully on his side.

And, it has to be said again that NATO's relentless eastward expansion (Croatia, Albania and Macedonia are expected to join this week) - while never inviting Russia to join - raises questions of what the alliance's purpose is in the 21st century.

NATO, on paper, has always a defensive coalition. Does adding a few Balkan states, Ukraine and Georgia make the other members safer against any external threat? Or does it increase the likelihood of its members being drawn into an armed conflict?

NATO's previous waves of expansion into the former Communist bloc (including the 2004acceptance of the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have nutured the Kremlin's suspicion that NATO remains an anti-Russia bloc, thus feeding the growing paranoia and surliness in Moscow. In the minds of the ex-KGB agents who now run the country, NATO's push east demands a response.

We've already seen how this goes. NATO pushes east, ignoring Russia's concerns; Russia responds by investing more money in its military, testing new weapons systems, and doing all it can to thwart Western interests around the globe. The West's conviction that Russia is hostile necessitates Russia behaving in a hostile manner. Eventually, the damage done to the relationship between Russia and the West will become irreversible.

There's a new president on the way to the Kremlin, and while I hold little hope that Dmitriy Medvedev will be anything more than Putin's loyal second-in-command, I also once believed that Yeltsin would control Putin. Until we see what Medvedev's Russia looks like, perhaps this is a time to put the escalations on hold.

So here's a vote against expanding the Old Cold War alliance in hopes of calming the new one. NATO has other things to worry about right now. So do Ukraine and Georgia.

P.S. The New Cold War has just been published in Turkey and Estonia. That's the Turkish cover top left. Can't say I'm a fan, but maybe orange is the new black in Istanbul.

The elusive 72 per cent

Stop the presses! The Guardian is reporting the shocking news that the Kremlin is planning to tamper with the results of Sunday's election.

The Guardian (Tom Parfitt, one of the story's authors, is a friend and a hell of a reporter) quotes election officials around the country who say they've been told that they need to deliver anywhere from 65 per cent to 88 per cent of the vote to Dmitriy Medvedev, with the overall national figure landing somewhere around 72 per cent for Vladimir Putin's sidekick.

For months, ever since Putin announced that he was backing his long-time aide Medvedev to succeed him, the only question about the election was how big a margin President Medvedev would win by. Now we know.

Bizarrely, the target is exactly the same as the one the Kremlin set in 2004. After Vladimir Vladimirovich won a second term with a resounding 71.3 per cent of the vote, several of his spin doctors confirmed to me that the 72 per cent had been the officially mandated target (tsk-tsk to those who let down the nation by failing to deliver the additional 0.7 per cent).

Why? Because it was a wide enough win to make clear to the Kremlin's enemies at home and abroad that Putin was a juggernaut: 72 per cent made it clear that Putin embodied the will of the nation, and those who opposed him were unpatriotic. The lunatic fringe.

But quietly conscious of criticisms that Russia was sliding away from democracy, the puppet masters (Gleb Pavlovsky, Marat Gelman, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Sergei Markov et al) determined that a higher figure - Putin had been flirting with 80 per cent in some pre-election polls - would seem improbable.

To their minds, 72 per cent would show the world that a real vote had taken place, and the Kremlin's man had defeated his weak and divided opponents. Eighty per cent smacked of the bad old days where there was only one name on the ballot.

I'm impressed the Kremlin is still working this hard to try and pretend that democracy is alive and well in its realm.

My question is, what happens if Medvedev does reach 72 per cent, or (gasp!) 71.4? Does that mean he's more popular than aspiring Prime Minister Putin? Is that allowed?

A nation holds its breath.

A sign of the falsified times

Sigh.

Predictably, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov has been disqualified from running for president by Russia's Central Elections Commission. The move clears the way for a nice smooth run for Vladimir Putin's chosen successor, Dmitriy Medvedev. He will now run virtually unopposed in the Russian Federation's fifth presidential elections since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yes, there will be opposition, but only of the token sort. Medvedev's remaining "opponents" are a pair of multi-time losers in Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as well as a virtual unknown, Andrey Bogdanov. Kasyanov was the only figure Russia's fractured liberal opposition could potentially have rallied around.

Opinion polls showed him trailing badly with less than 2 per cent support (compared to somewhere between 60 and 82 per cent for Medvedev, if the numbers are to be believed), but Kasyanov and his supporters never expected to win power through the Kremlin-controlled ballot boxes.

Though the odds were long, their aim was always to replicate Ukraine's Orange Revolution, with masses crowding Red Square on election day to peacefully protest a vote that everyone knows in advance will be deeply flawed. For that to have any chance of working, they needed a Viktor Yushchenko, a popular candidate to rally around.

One by one the other potential Yushchenkos dropped out or were forced out of the race by the Kremlin: Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Boris Nemtsov. Now Kasyanov's gone too. So, by and large, is any lingering hope of peaceful democratic change in Russia in the near future.

(It's worth noting here that even Belarus's tyrannical Alexander Lukashenko at least allows an opposition candidate or two to run for president every five years... as did Putin in 2004 when he was confident of his personal popularity. It appears that despite the opinion polls, the Kremlin is less sure than it's letting on about Medvedev's real popular appeal.)

The Kremlin understood the stakes, which is why it pulled out one of the most farcical excuses in their playbook: the falsified signatures charge.

Anyone who doubts this is a canard only has to look back at how it's been used in Russia and across the former Soviet Union over the last 17 years. Either there's a very organized ring of international signature forgers at work (usually in league with those opposed to oppressive regimes) or the autocrats are scared to put their so-called popular support to a real test.

Here's an incomplete list of the invalid signatures phenomenon in post-Soviet elections:

November 1993: The Russian All-People's Union, which included elements of the old Communist Party, is barred from running in the first post-Soviet Duma elections due because of 20,000 falsified signatures.

July 1995: Eight parties barred from Armenia's first post-Soviet parliamentary vote because of falsified signatures.

March 2000: Konstantin Titov, Yevgeny Savostyanov, Ismail Tagi-Zade, and Umar Dzhabrailov are all barred from running for president over allegations of, well, falsified signatures. The elections, you may have heard, were eventually won by a Vladimir Putin.

October 2000: Citing falsified signatures, Azerbaijan's Central Election Committee bans the National Democratic Party from taking part in parliamentary elections .

September 2003: Malik Saidullayev disqualified from Chechnya's presidential elections over falsified signatures. Eventually all serious candidates are forced out of the race, clearing the way for the pro-Kremlin Akhmat Kadyrov (the deceased father of Ramzan) to run almost unopposed.

July 2004: Belarussian human rights group Viasna-96 (or Spring-96) loses its legal standing over charges that it falsified signatures on its registration papers.

December 2004: All opposition parties (all the real ones, anyway) in Uzbekistan are barred from parliamentary elections over signature issues.

November 2006: Opposition candidate Andrei Safonov is barred from running for the post of "president" in Moldova's pro-Russian breakaway province of Transdniestria. Wanna guess the reason?

March 2007: The liberal Yabloko party is barred from running in St. Petersburg municipal elections over falsified signatures.

October 2007: Russia's Green Party, along with the People’s Union and the Party for Peace and Unity, is barred from running in Duma elections over illegal John Hancocks.

January 2008: Kasyanov disqualified.

The list speaks for itself. Managed democracy, indeed.

Ah hell, why not take credit on this rare instance that it's due? As the Why Democracy? website notes in its weekly news roundup, "Canadian journalist Mark MacKinnon predicted Putin's falsified signatures approach a week ago." (See last post.)

I wish it hadn't been so easy. Like I said at the start - sigh.

S Novom Godom!

Я желаю Вам хорошее здоровье, удачу и успех в новый год!

Now back to business. I went silent for a little while. Very, very silent. Largely because my day job has been all-consuming of late, what with President Bush's tire-spinning visit to my current home, the Middle East.

That said, I'm off to Baku tomorrow for a weekend of pure relaxation by the Caspian Sea. The thought of returning to even the edge of the old USSR has me thinking:

Candidate Kasyanov - He's got the two million signatures. Does the Kremlin have the courage - and the barest commitment to democracy - to let him run against their man, Dmitriy Medvedev? Or are we going to see another "falsified signatures" charge in the coming days that will again prove that Russia is not inching towards democracy, but sliding back towards authoritarianism.

While we're at it, will Yavlinsky, Nemtsov and co. have the good sense to put their egos aside and back the only man with a hope of giving the Kremlin machine a run for its oil money?

Oleg Kozlovsky - His story is a warning, not only about fading freedom of speech in Russia, but about the biggest peril that many talented young Russians face - the draft. Many of my Russian friends spent most of their 20s doing anything - anything - to avoid being sucked into the dark and dangerous pit that is the Russian army. I've seen kids press-ganged off the streets of St. Petersburg while out walking with friends, and met soldiers in Chechnya whose parents didn't even know they were in the army, let alone stationed in Grozny. I'll wholeheartedly sign on to the Free Kozlovksy campaign, but add a note that there are thousands more like him, leading lower-profile lives, who also deserve our concern.

Much More Misha - Four more years of Saakashvili starts off with his government laying charges against tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili. Patarkatsishvili's no saint, but neither are Vladimir Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. If this was Putin laying charges against another oligarch, wouldn't we all be asking questions about whether the President isn't really just trying to quash all political opposition?

British Council tomfoolery - If the Russian government thinks the British Council is a den of spies, it should produce the evidence and expel those it no longer wants in the country. Otherwise, it should sending spooks to follow Council staff around St. Petersburg. It's an embarrassing saga, and not for the British.

Kosovo: I've asked the question before: why is the West so insistent that Serbia is divisible, but not Kosovo? (And not Georgia or Moldova?)

Azerbaijan 2016 - C'mon, really? This what President Ilham Aliev wants to spend all the oil money on? An expensive, sure-to-fail Olympics bid? What about the hundreds of thousands of Azeris who live in poverty, just outside the Baku bubble?

February 5: If it was the $26.95 that was keeping you from buying The New Cold War, never fear. The paperback edition hits bookshelves Feb. 5.

A tale of two prime ministers

It's fitting that Yulia Tymoshenko should finally become prime minister of Ukraine one day after Vladimir Putin declared he would be Russia's prime minister under a President Dmitry Medvedev.

Both have been prime minister before, Tymoshenko for a short and tumultuous period in 2005 before she was fired by President Viktor Yushchenko, Putin for a controversial six months in 1999 before Boris Yeltsin stepped aside to hand him the presidency. They have open distaste for each other stemming from the long and ongoing Russia-versus-the West struggle for Ukraine's soul, in which Tymoshenko has played (at least in the Western media) Princess Leia to Putin's Darth Vader.

The way the two old foes were named to the PM's chair this time around says much about the comparative state of democracy in their respective countries today.

For all Ukraine's instability, Tymoshenko's dramatic return to power - establishing herself as a third power centre beyond both President Yushchenko and his rival Viktor Yanukovich - shows how vibrant and pluralistic Ukraine's political scene now is. Yes, all of the main parties are tinged with corruption and are too close to big business, but Tymoshenko's election victory two months ago stands as proof that no politician can rule Ukraine without the consent of the people.

More good news: even though her party emerged as the de facto winner of the Sept. 30 elections, Tymoshenko only became prime minister after a long process of bartering and coalition-making. No one force can dominate Ukraine on its own anymore, as Leonid Kuchma and his allies did until the 2004 Orange Revolution.

None of the above can be said about Russia. Vladimir Putin stands alone in Russia as the sole centre of power. If he says the unheralded Dmirty Medvedev shall be president, then Mr. Medvedev it will be. If Putin says he wants to be PM, only a fool would bet against him achieving that aim.

As I have frequently pointed out in the past, Putin does all this largely with the consent of the Russian people. But that doesn't make it any more democratic. The institutions needed to make and keep Russia great - a free media, serious opposition and a real parliament - have been systematically eliminated during his eight years in power. For all its oil-fuelled economic growth and new swagger on the international stage, the country is inherently weaker as a result.

Today may look like a triumph for Putin and Putinism. But one day, when he's gone, Russians will come to rue the system they watched him build.

In the meantime, at least future summits between the Russian and Ukrainian prime ministers will have a touch of drama to them.

President Dmitry Medvedev

So now we know. It will be Dmitry Medvedev, not Sergei Ivanov (and not Vladimir Putin) who succeeds Vladimir Putin. Putin, it's just been announced, "fully supports" Medvedev's candidacy to replace him when he leaves office after his second term expires in the spring.

So all hail President Dmitry. There is, of course, the small matter of elections to be sorted out, but you can be sure that the Kremlin - unless this decision creates a major rift behind the red walls - will make sure Putin's man is elected. The liberal opposition is self-destructing anyway, choosing not one, but three candidates to run for the presidency in April.

So what can be deduced from this, in these first minutes after Putin's announcement? To me, it says that Putin, instead of choosing someone else from inside the siloviki, the cadre of security service veterans who run the country, has chosen someone personally loyal to him. Medvedev is not a chekist (ex-KGB agent) like Putin and Ivanov, he's a Putinist.

Medvedev has been at Putin's side since the early 1990s, when Putin was chief of staff to St. Petersburg mayor Anatoliy Sobchak and Medvedev was a foreign affairs advisor.

As Putin rose to power, Medvedev followed. First he was chief of staff to Putin after he was appointed prime minister in 1999 by Boris Yeltsin. Then he ran Putin's 2000 presidential election campaign and afterwards became deputy chief of staff to President Vladimir. Next he was installed as chairman of the board at Gazprom, the giant gas company that Putin has turned into the Kremlin's most effective foreign policy tool.

When Alexander Voloshin quit as Putin's chief of staff over the sordid Mikhail Khodorkovsky affair in 2003, Medvedev was brought in to replace him and get the Kremlin back on course. Two years ago, in the first hint that this moment might eventually come, he was made First Deputy Prime Minister (along with Ivanov).

What does all this mean? Two things.

The first is relations between Russia and the West may yet recover some. The 42-year-old Medvedev is seen as more liberal and pro-Western than the hardline Ivanov. Ivanov was the tough guy you always saw in military fatigues noddling gravely at the testing of new Russian military hardware. Medvedev was the mild-mannered man in the suit that you rarely saw at all until he was made deputy PM in an effort to build up his public persona (although he was theoretically also the guy who made the decision to turn off Gazprom's taps to Ukraine and Belarus when those countries bucked the Kremlin's will...).

The second is that real power will remain in the hands of our old friend, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Putin's choice was between a man unquestionably loyal to him (Medvedev) and a man unquestionably loyal to the system (Ivanov). He chose the former.

Medvedev owes Putin everything. If Putin asks him to do something - to make him prime minister, or even to relinquish the presidency because Vladimir Vladimirovich misses the comforts of the Kremlin - he'll do it.

Thermobaric bombs and Viktor Zubkov

So I was sitting in the radio studio yesterday ready to record another interview promoting my book The New Cold War for the BBC/PRI program The World, when a pair of odd questions came over the line: are you ready to talk about thermobaric bombs and Viktor Zubkov?

You can hear my off-the-cuff remarks during my interview with Lisa Mullins here.

Even with an extra 24 hours to think about it, I still can't quite figure out what Putin's up to by appointing someone as unknown as Zubkov to the PM's post this close to the Duma and presidential elections.

I have three, admittedly incomplete, theories:

- Putin hasn't made up his mind yet between leading contenders Sergei Ivanov and Dmitriy Medvedev. Under this scenario, Zubkov is a third candidate that Putin wants the public to get to know before the presidential elections in the spring. Remember that Putin himself was a nobody when Boris Yeltsin made him prime minister back in 1999. (Zubkov himself said yesterday that he "does not rule out the possibility" of running for the big job next year.)

- Putin HAS decided on one of Ivanov or Medvedev (the smart money's on Ivanov, an ex-KGB man like Putin himself who has served as defense minister and deputy PM), and Zubov is that man's choice for prime minister. Putting Zubkov in now, the thinking goes, would allow a smooth transition between this administration and the next one.

- Putin's not going anywhere, and he's deliberately muddying the field to show how far he stands above any challengers to his throne.

It's too early to say which of these scenarios is right. We'll have to wait to hear more from Putin, and Zubkov himself.

As for the big blast in the desert, the Father of All Bombs was tested for one reason only - because it was bigger than the U.S.-produced Mother of All Bombs. Just another hello to the West from Russia's suddenly revived armed forces.

Problematic Putin porn

So Vladimir Putin has a chiselled (if oddly hairless) chest. In the words of a presidential admirer who left their thoughts on the Komsolmolskaya Pravda website, it's one "vigorous torso."

To Vladimir Vladimirovich, I say congrats. It's likely not easy staying in shape whilst plotting your country's return to superpower status. The days, surely, are already filled with meetings about how to marginalize the pro-Western opposition, bring Ukraine to heel or what journalist to silence next. It's gotta be doubly tough when etiquette requires your attendance at myriad sour cream-laden banketi, which I know did nothing for my physique.

The question that comes to mind, though, is why are we being shown these pictures now. After all, Vladimir Vladimirovich is stepping down next year, heading into graceful retirement at age 55. Right? With presidential elections just half a year away, shouldn't we be pondering the pecs of Sergei Ivanov and Dmitriy Medvedev, Mikhail Kasyanov and Garry Kasparov?

Why is Komsomolskaya Pravda still telling kids to "Be Like Putin" on its front page? Is it because you're not going anywhere after all, Vladimir Vladimirovich?

Though I make no claim to being a political strategist (it's Mark McKinnon - no relation - who used to work for George W. Bush), I have to agree with Yevgenia Albats who worried aloud on her Эхо Москвы show that the pictures - which ominously were posted on the official Kremlin website - might be the strongest statement yet that Putin is planning on sticking around after his second term expires next year.

These photos are campaign material, pure and simple. They're meant to show the Russian public (and the world) that Putin is fit and ready to remain at Russia's helm past 2008, if he so chooses.

Vladimir Vladimirovich, of course, is constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term next year. But two of his closest allies, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, have changed the rules in their neighbouring ex-Soviet republics so that they can run as often as they like. Nazarbayev recently urged Putin to follow suit in the interests of Russia's stability.

Sergei Markov, a Kremlin advisor, told the Associated Press that the pictures emphasized again that Vladimir Vladimirovich was "cool" - at least in the eyes of the Russian public. "That's been the image throughout the presidency, cool," Markov said.

Markov is one of those in the Kremlin's inner circle who's been tasked with finding a successor to Putin, be it Ivanov, Medvedev or one of the other siloviki. The decision to publish the Putin porn tells me they haven't yet found anyone "cooler" than Vladimir Vladimirovich and that "Operation Successor" as its known inside the Kremlin, may be morphing into "Operation Incumbent."