TODAY:  Vladimir Putin announces he will stand for President, ending months of conjecture; could remain in power until 2024; fears of stagnation, repression abound.  Medvedev tipped for PM post; Alexei Kudrin vows to quit if such is the case.  Reactions range from extreme disappointment to resignation, some welcome ‘stability’.  Sergei Magnitksy’s mother asks for murder investigation; bloggers detained; Luke Harding’s run in with Kremlin; Russia establishes diplomatic ties with Pacific island nation.

It’s official: Vladimir Putin will run for President next March.  The decision was announced at the United Russia party congress in a speech met by ‘rapturous applause’.  While intense consideration may have been given to the run up to this announcement: ‘The question, as The Economist has regularly written, was not whether he would stay in power, but how he would do it’.  First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov has said United Russia faces a ‘serious’ fight with the leftist parties in the run-up to elections.   Get real, says RFE/RL: ‘Putin’s victory in March is a virtual certainty, given both his popularity and Russia’s tightly controlled political system.’   Having extended the presidential term, a victory would mean Putin could remain power until he is 72, in 2024, which would make his reign as ‘national leader’ almost as long as Josef Stalin’s.  The Washington Post makes excellent use of sarcasm in this editorial:  ‘Mr. Putin has not sent millions to their deaths or to the gulag. He showed that the imprisonment or exile of a few key businessmen and the unpunished murders of a couple of dozen crusading journalists could silence their compatriots almost as effectively’ .  ‘I think the Brezhnev analogy is quite a serious one’, adds the editor of the Economist.  It was also inferred that President Medvedev will swap positions with his tandem partner and become Prime Minister; it also possible he may head the United Russia Party if it retains majority in the State Duma while Putin returns to the Kremlin after the 2012 election.  Which may lead to an electoral and legal quandary, says Victor Davidoff, for ‘how can the president run for a seat in parliament before his term is up?’