The Putin Puzzle Revisited

Putin’s presidency is constitutionally mandated to end in 2008, when new elections will be held. But who is Putin’s Putin? He succeeded Boris Yeltsin by promising that, whatever purges he might carry out, Yeltsin and his family would be shielded. Yeltsin was old, ill and alcoholic, and Putin’s offer must have seemed one he couldn’t refuse. Putin is young and vigorous, and has no reason to put his fate in the hands of a successor or successors who wouldn’t be able to guarantee his lifelong immunity even if they wanted.
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Putin Succession Doubts Unsettle the Kremlin

So far, Mr Putin is resisting all efforts to persuade him to amend the constitution and stay for a third term as president of Russia, but the pressures are mounting, The Financial Times report. He has promised to remain closely involved - but Russia has never been run successfully with a division of power in the Kremlin. So the speculation remains.
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Moldova Rebel Region Re-Elects Pro-Moscow Leader

As was widely expected, Moldova's rebel Trans-Dniester region re-elected pro-Russian leader Igor Smirnov for a fourth five-year term as president in Sunday's presidential election, the head of the central election commission said on Monday.
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Russia: Stunt Protests and the Law

On December 6, Vladimir Putin has signed into law a bill that abolished minimum voter turnout (20 percent) for all elections in Russia. On Nov. 23, a week after the controversial bill was approved by the Duma, two young political activists - Ilya Yashin, the youth leader of Yabloko and Maria Gaidar, the daughter of Yegor Gaidar, the former Russian PM - protested the bill by spending an hour and a half suspended on ropes from a Moscow bridge facing the Kremlin and flying a 10-meter banner, which said: “GIVE THE ELECTION BACK TO THE PEOPLE, BASTARDS!”
They were detained by the police and fined 500 rubles (about $20) by the court – a pittance compared to the sentence of Olga Kudrina in May 2006, a member of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for climbing the Rossiya Hotel and hanging a banner saying “Putin, go away on your own” on the side facing the Kremlin.