“Is he the affable front man for the business-as-usual hard-liners, a puppet president who offers soothing remarks, but little else? Or is he a genuine reformer who is edging Russia away from the more heavy-handed practices of Mr. Putin, but needs time to make his mark?”

What Clifford Levy writes in today’s New York Times about Dmitry Medvedev could easily be said about Barack Obama himself.

But unlike the new POTUS, who came to power from the opposition with a sweeping mandate for change, Medvedev has always been a member of the incumbent party; a successor rather than a challenger.

So, for all the tempting parallels with Obama, Medvedev-McCain is a much better fit when trying to set expectations for the Russian president.

Imagine if McCain had become US president. By many measures, he is a much more moderate, progressive and ideologically discrete politician than Bush. He was relatively liberal on social issues such as abortion and religion, denounced torture, and refused to jump on the anti-immigration bandwagon.

In fact, McCain’s reputation for pragmatism and bi-partisanship left many die-hard GOP partisans and their champions in the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, devastated, but gave him enough cross party clout to appeal even to liberal Hillary Clinton voters.

Medvedev – a non-ideological pragmatist with moderate leanings and liberal tastes – is in many ways to Putin what McCain was to Bush.

Levy quotes IrinaYasina, an analyst at the Institute for the Economy in Transition in Moscow:

“We so want to believe that things are getting better that we sometimes confuse our expectations with what is really happening. We so want to believe that there is a big difference between Putin and Medvedev. And sometimes our hopes prevent us from seeing the reality.”

Many on the American left are saying exactly this about Obama, astutely evoked by Naomi Klein in a recent Nation article. Yet such sentiments were also expressed during the early stages of the US presidential campaign with reference to McCain.

It’s worth remembering how susceptible liberal journalists and commentators were to the hardscrabble charms of the underdog aboard his Straight Talk Express. At that time, in late 2007, it was left to the few lonely Yasinas of the US media, such as Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, to shout: snap out of it!

So smitten were many liberal voters by McCain’s offers of a ‘sane’ and ‘commonsense’ republicanism after years of Bush’s cultural revolution that Democratic groups felt it necessary to launch a desperate campaign to brand him “McSame as Bush”.

Indeed, crushed by the forces of his party, McCain has already been forced to moderate his anti-torture stance and other maverick policies.

Is Medvedev McSame as Putin? According to Aleksei K. Simonov, president of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, “Medvedev is just pronouncing nice words. But there has been a complete lack of deeds.”

That’s not entirely true: he has, for example, enacted a wide reaching military reform, demonstrating his seriousness by sacking the intransigent head of military intelligence. He has also freed Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina from prison and made anti-corruption promises.

But as Ilya Milshtein points out in the opposition newpaper Grani.ru, many of these measures might have happened anyway; for instance the intelligence director had had a falling out with the defence minister and may have been removed on Putin’s orders.

Words matter, however, as Obama has himself said. In that sense, in ridding Russian politics of the macho Putinite vocabulary, Medvedev has already accomplished a kind of thaw.

But in the words of Milshtein, it is a ‘weak, cowardly thaw, quickly covered by fresh snow”.

In his first speech as Russia's new president, Dimitri Medvedev pledged to use his tenure in office to protect and expand economic and civil freedom in the country. But amid the pomp and circumstance surrounding his May 7, 2008, inauguration in the Kremlin's opulent Saint Andrew's Hall, observers are raising questions about whether Medvedev's new administration will actually lead Russia on a parallel course to that of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin.

These questions were made all the more prescient after Medvedev fulfilled expectations and nominated Putin for the Prime Minister's post within hours of the swearing-in ceremony, allowing Putin to retain influence through certain executive powers granted to the Prime Minister in Russia's system. The world will be focused on the policy course that Medvedev steers Russia in, particularly since the cast of other international leaders will be changing over the coming year. As of January 2009, those changes will include U.S. President George W. Bush, who today voiced enthusiasm for working with Medvedev in his remaining time in office.

After President Bush's departure however, his successor will have to work with Medvedev on the future relationship between the United States and Russia. Read this Council on Foreign Relations article to learn more about where Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain stand on U.S. diplomacy with Russia.

The election of Dmitry Medvedev as the new president of Russia on March 2nd has been met with mixed reviews from leaders around the world. While many congratulated Medvedev on his victory and voiced hopes for a positive international working relationship with him, these salutations were matched by concerns over how the Russian elections were conducted. The German government called into question whether the election processes neglected democratic principals, but said that Chancellor Angela Merkel still looked forward to meeting with the new leader on her scheduled March 8th visit to Moscow, and that the election reflected the German people's desire for "continuity and stability."

According to the U.K.'s Guardian, France echoed Germany's concerns over Russia's democratic process, but the outcome was greeted with a phone call from President Nicholas Sarkozy to Medvedev the day after his election inviting him to France, and the new Russian president pledged to maintain a relationship of "confidence and openness" between the two countries. In part, France's acceptance came in line with the United Kingdom and the European Union. Britain's relationship with Russia was strained under Putin, but the U.K. government expressed its hopes for a more cooperative interaction.

Reactions from former Soviet sphere of influence were as mixed as their European counterparts. The Czech foreign minister aired "regret" that the Russian elections had not been as open as preferred, and the opposition party claimed that the election threatened the future of Russian democracy altogether. Meanwhile, a group of election observers from Belarus said that the process was compliant to Russia's constitution and laws.

In the United States, the 2008 presidential candidates reacted to the Russian election results with their own doubts. According to this article by Kommersant, one of Russia's daily online newspapers, New York Senator Hillary Clinton said that the election marked a "retreat" from democracy, while Illinois Senator Barack Obama named the lack of free media and the repression of opposition political parties as reasons for his disappointment over Medvedev's victory. Arizona Senator John McCain voiced the harshest criticism however, stating in a press conference that the Russian elections were "clearly rigged."

Finally, an editorial in the Financial Times recommends that the West be open to a Medvedev presidency in the hope of improving relations with Russia. An interactive slideshow documents one journalist's travels on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to uncover why Vladimir Putin has garnered so much support for himself and his political allies.