It is unsurprising that observers have eagerly anticipated President Medvedev’s keynote address at the St Petersburg Economic Forum.  With Vladimir Putin safely stowed in Moscow, the event has been viewed as an ideal place for the modernizing President to assert his own identity, a fact of particular import this year as the presidential elections loom.  One analyst quoted here in an analysis of today’s speech by Reuters argues that the President’s words were a ‘campaign message: Medvedev has decided to declare clearly that he is planning to stay for a second term, that the decisions he has taken are essential for the country‘.  The FT also suggests that even if the economic messages conveyed belong to the classic Medvedian realm of reform and modernization, the political message, is, it would seem quite novel:

What stood out to the audience, however, was not a new Russia, but a new Medvedev.