The body language said it all. Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s so-called President, meeting the French President in Moscow yesterday, looked tense and subdued, a pale face above a dead-white shirt, sitting cramped in one of the Kremlin’s gilt chairs as Nicolas Sarkozy took up the airspace with expansive hand gestures. In contrast, Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister (the role he chose when appointing Medvedev as his successor), has been relaxed, leaning back in his chair, using long answers to shut out other speakers in chairing his Cabinet and in public appearances.

The past five days have answered the puzzle of who is running Russia. Putin is clearly in charge; Medvedev has seemed like his puppet. Putin flew from the Olympic Games to the border of South Ossetia, an action man dashing in to comfort terrified civilians. Medvedev has been confined to the Kremlin.

“I have taken the decision to end the operation to force the Georgian authorities into peace,” Medvedev was quoted as saying yesterday. At best (for Medvedev’s cause), he was offering the softer side of Russia, the conciliatory President to Putin’s hardline Prime Minister. But it is hard to see any signs of his independent action in Russia’s retaliation, so heavily flavoured with Putin’s old obsessions.

It is Putin who has believed that the dismemberment of the Soviet Union is a profound humilation, but perhaps only a temporary disaster that might one day – under a strong enough leader – be reversed. He has loathed the Georgian President since the two met in 2004. He made the crushing of Chechen separatists his own mission. And he found the recent Western rebuff to Russian wishes over Kosovo enraging.

Vladimir Putin's mastery checkmates the West

Michael Binyon says Russia has been biding its time - but its victory in Georgia has been brutal and brilliant

Multimedia

• Video: stories from the front line

• Pictures: Georgia conflict

BACKGROUND

• Hellraising for the rich: how Osborne met Rothschild

• Oleg Deripaska - oligarch at centre of storm

Related Links

• Georgia loses the fight, but win the PR war

• Russians shell Gori, hours before ceasefire

• Georgian oil pipeline: the front line

Putin’s fury over Kosovo may explain the scale of Russia’s response over South Ossetia. Russian officials have explicitly compared the two, arguing that they are doing no more in protecting “their” citizens in South Ossetia than the West did by its military assault to repel Serb forces from Kosovo. But that account ignores, for a start, the Serbian attempt to drive Kosovan Albanians, the majority of the province’s population, out of their homes, and the deaths that had already occurred.

Of course, there should be qualifications to this picture of Putin as President in all but name. Until Friday a version more favorable to Medvedev, which Western officials have kept in mind, is that Putin was merely waiting to confirm that Medvedev would come up to the mark before deciding whether to step more decisively out of the picture. After seeing warfare break out between government agencies once it became clear that he was really stepping down as President, Putin wanted to be sure that Medvedev, with shallow links to many of those agencies, could take command.

That is now looking less plausible, as are hopes that Medvedev, more liberal and commercially minded than Putin, might make Russia’s relations with Europe and the US warmer. Instead, it looks as if Putin’s special sourness and his aggrieved belief that he has done the West favours with no reward are to shape Russian policy. Those wanting to be hopeful about Russia must wish that its increasingly modern and open society, with people travelling and feeling part of Europe, will win out over its irritable and aggressive leadership.

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