President Dmitry Medvedev

Respected Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said he will resign if current President Dmitry Medvedev is named prime minister next year under a new Vladimir Putin presidency. On Saturday, Prime Minister Putin said he will run for president in the spring and would select Medvedev as his prime minister if elected. Kudrin, who is one of the most trusted Russian politicians among foreign investors, said Sunday that he has fundamental economic disagreements with Medvedev. "I do not see myself in the new government.

Russia is a country adrift, President Dmitry Medvedev told a vast audience that gathered Thursday beneath the gold chandeliers of the Kremlin to hear his state of the union address. Russia is lounging on a crumbling network of leftover Soviet oil infrastructure and nuclear weapons, he said. Russia has conducted a foreign policy fueled by "nostalgia and prejudice," and law enforcement is riddled with "unscrupulous" agents, he added. In a wide-ranging 100-minute speech, Medvedev seemed eager to set himself apart from former President Vladimir Putin, who molded Medvedev's career for years, preceded him in the Kremlin and is broadly understood to have kept his status as the most powerful figure in Russian politics.

  Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, was marginalized as a political leader as Russians found it hard to forgive him for the economic deprivations that followed. Now, against the backdrop of growing protests against Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Gorbachev has emerged as a vocal critic of the government, and his popularity among the opposition is on the rise. Gorbachev, 81, spoke to The Times in Moscow this week. Do you think the past presidential election in Russia was fair?

When he arrived in Moscow for national security talks Monday, President Obama was tracing the footsteps of U.S. presidents dating back to Eisenhower. And, like many of his predecessors, Obama found out what difficult bargaining partners the Russians can make. The two sides took small steps toward scaling back their nuclear arsenals but left wide differences and lingering difficulties on other issues, such as Iran, missile defense, American military support to Russia's neighbors and human rights.

When Russian leader Vladimir Putin climbed into the martial arts ring in the Olimpiysky Palace in downtown Moscow recently to congratulate a Russian wrestler who had quite convincingly beaten his American opponent, he was greeted by an unfamiliar sound. The crowd, which, given the high ticket price, consisted mostly of wealthy and middle-class Russians, booed, with some shouting, "Go away!" The prime minister's press service later hurried to explain that it was a misunderstanding and that the audience last month was booing not Putin but American fighter Jeff Monson, who was being led away from the hall at the same time.

The question has all but disappeared from Russian discourse after months of feverish debate: Who is in charge, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev? It's been nearly a year since Putin, faced with the end of his presidency, endorsed his long-loyal underling to succeed him in the Kremlin. The speculation that once rattled around the capital after Putin restyled himself as prime minister -- whether the two men would clash, whether Medvedev would try to eclipse his onetime mentor -- has fallen away.

The 2012 Russian presidential elections may be over already. Vladimir Putin's words and deeds of late have made it eminently clear that he's had enough of being prime minister and wants the No. 1 job back from President Dmitry Medvedev. And many experts believe it's his for the taking. Amid what political analysts have identified as a fierce power struggle between the two Russian leaders, the expulsion of a key Medvedev aide from the Kremlin is being interpreted as a sign that Putin has gained the upper hand.

Having survived — barely — an 8% contraction in its gross domestic product (the worst among the G-20 countries), Russia's prospects for the next few years are iffy at best. Unless oil shoots back up to more than $100 a barrel, the country's economy may grow only slightly — or stagnate for the next few years. In response to its economic woes, the Kremlin has decided that what Russia needs is the equivalent of a Silicon Valley. And so the government is building "Innovation City" in Skolkovo, just outside Moscow.

The Bush administration and its European allies, stung by Russia's formal recognition of two separatist Georgian enclaves, faced new pressure Tuesday to strike back diplomatically and politically against the Kremlin's widening move to assert its power in the Caucasus. U.S. officials, who have shunned a military response, did not publicly specify available options. But privately, they cited the possibility of excluding Russia from a number of international institutions, such as the World Trade Organization.

It is a spectacle as old as Kremlin intrigue, but new to the Russia of Vladimir Putin. The country's main national television channels, all controlled by the Kremlin, have launched a series of blistering reports accusing one of the heavyweights of Russian politics, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, of neglecting his duties, abusing his office and engaging in corruption. Analysts have little doubt that the reports represent a campaign against the mayor, who has been in office for 18 years, a period in which his wife has amassed a fortune in the construction business estimated at $2.9 billion.