This week, we learned who the next president of Russia will be and who will be his prime minister.

On Monday, President Vladimir Putin--who cannot run for a third consecutive term--named First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as his choice for president. One day later, Medvedev returned the favor by saying that Putin was his choice for Prime Minister. Yes, there will still be a presidential election on March 2, but given the strong win by the pro-Putin United Russia party in the December 2 parliamentary elections, Medvedev seems to have a lock on the presidency. Reuters reported Friday that an opinion poll indicated that 35% of Russian voters would pick Medvedev, which was 14 percentage points more than any of the potential challengers. United Russia will hold a party congress on Monday to formally nominate Medvedev.

There were hundreds and hundreds of news stories on the week's political developments, including several sharply worded opinion pieces in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. The common theme running through all is that Medvedev, a legal scholar who has not served in the KGB, is a man of Putin's making who will not veer from his predecessor's course. Of course, Putin himself was once viewed as a caretaker successor to Boris Yeltsin and that's not how things have turned out. (Interestingly, that point was also made in Pravda's profile of Medvedev.) You can read the Wikipedia biography on Medvedev here.

One odd upshot of the week's political developments: Russian spirits makers rushed to patent "Medved" vodka brand names.

In other news, President Putin ended a two-day visit to Belarus without the reunification agreement that had been widely speculated in Western news reports. The two countries did pledge close cooperation on trade, defense and energy.

Russia and Iran resolved their differences over the Bushehr nuclear reactor and said that work on the project would now be finished.

Ford Motor workers in St. Petersburg will go back to work on Monday, ending a four-week strike. According to Reuters, negotiations on pay raises will not begin until full production has resumed. Workers had been demanding a 30% wage hike to cope with higher inflation in Russia.

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