Russia's new President Dimtry Medvedev, sworn in yesterday, is expected to bring little change to the direction of his country’s affairs if only because his predecessor Vladimir Putin, who plucked him from obscurity to succeed him, has been a highly popular two-term president, who did much to restore Russia’s prestige after the humiliation of the Yeltsin years.

The contrast with the new tenant of the Oval Office next January could hardly be greater. In George W. Bush Americans have suffered a two-term president who has lowered US standing in the world and capped his lackluster performance by blundering into a recession. The fervent hope in America will be that the next president will do something to restore US pride and rebuild links with allies around the world which the Bush administration has so strained and damaged. Therefore, Medvedev arrives in the Kremlin at an important moment. He has eight months in which to establish his position before opening a relationship with the new man — because only a scandal of Democrat gerrymandering could now put Hillary Clinton on the presidential ticket instead of Barack Obama — in the White House.

It may very well be that Medvedev will be in many areas, a reprise of Putin and that the former president, as prime minister, will remain a powerful force in his administration. But this does not overrule the fact that Medvedev is now Russia’s head of state with sweeping powers. What happens from hereon will be in his name, not Putin’s. How he chooses to build on the foundations laid by Putin will be important. To a significant extent, certainly in foreign policy, the achievements of the Putin administration were established by negatives. Russia needed to prove that it was back in the international game as a force to be reckoned with. And since, for the past decade, America has been the sole superpower, it has been Washington’s agenda which has shaped international events. Thus for Putin to cut loose from the commercial and political embrace the Americans imagined they could tighten around Russia as it emerged as a capitalist democracy, he needed to say “No.” No to the proposed US missile defense shield. No to an independent Kosovo. No to US sanctions on Sudan over its Darfur failures. No to former Russian satellites that refused to pay market rates for oil and gas.

As hydrocarbon revenues have flooded into the Russian treasury, it has been possible to begin rebuilding Russia’s armed forces so that its fleets are no longer rusting wrecks, its nuclear missiles no longer decaying in their silos and its still conscript army no longer ill-equipped, ill-trained and of low morale.

Now Medvedev has the chance to move to the positive — to quit merely blocking US international interventions but to initiate his own. Russia has been woefully quiescent within the Middle East Quartet and allowed Washington and the EU to make the running. The Kremlin needs now to set out its own agenda and so make it clear that the next US president will have to work with Moscow.