PRIME minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev sit in a restaurant. "I'll have the steak," Putin tells the waiter. "And the vegetable?" "He'll have the steak, too." It is a joke doing the rounds in Moscow and it represents one popular theory about where power will reside when Medvedev is inaugurated as president next month. Medvedev, runs the theory, will be no more than a puppet - a weak man who owes his position to his predecessor and who will have neither the strength, nor the will to alter the course set by Putin.
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