Meet the New Boss

Michael Idov loiters in Moscow on the eve of Dmitry Medvedev’s coronation

Georgia’s Messy Breakup

and why the August War was really a love story...

Dmitry Medvedev, looking comfortable in a big leather armchair, channeled his best Franklin D. Roosevelt when he spoke to the Russian people Sunday in his first in a planned series of television addresses. The debut talk, a “fireside chat” with no actual fire, focused on the global financial crisis. In the abridged version of the talk available on the Kremlin’s “blog,” it isn’t clear that Medvedev’s looking at an interviewer just off camera. So, despite his call for honesty, for the first two minutes we’re left wondering why he’s avoiding our eye contact. Let’s belatedly "liveblog" the highlights of the Kremlin’s edited highlights of Medvedev’s big talk as they unspool on our laptop.

While America's Santellis and Limbaughs try to create a populist upswell against Obama, the new face of idiotic Russian populism is a young, blond Putin-ite named Maria Sergeyeva. The 24-year-old blogger bounded onto the national stage last January with her fiery speech at a pro-Kremlin rally, telling crowds she was “certain” Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev would “protect” her from the financial crisis. There's nothing particularly novel about her Nashi-esque positions, but when Sergeyeva says the Ukrainian-Russian gas dispute is an American plot, that foreign cars are Trojan Horses, or that the Central Asian immigrants should go home, people listen. Must be her delivery?

Early this morning, Moscow-based New York Times correspondent C.J. Chivers was detained by the South Ossetian KGB as he tried to cross into Mogabruni, an Ossetian village on the border with Georgia, which claims its territory.