Dmitry Medvedev

·         On March 3, 2008 President Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked candidate, Dmitry Medvedev, won the ballot by a landslide

·         Dmitry Medvedev has a surname which can trace its origin to Sanskrit.

o        Medvedev is derived from ‘medved’ the Russian word for bear. For pre-Christian call the animal “Medved’.

o        While in Russian, ‘Medved’ would have translated to “someone having the knowledge of honey”, in Sanskrit, the language of Aryans, the word “Madhu Vedi” has the same meaning.

o        Experts believe that Arctic Russia was the home of Indo-European Aryans tribes before they migrated to the South due to advent of Ice Age.

·         Medvedev won 70.23% of the votem, His nearest rival was Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, with 17.76% of the vote.

o        The other candidates nationalist Liberal Democrat Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Democratic Party candidate Andrei Bogdanov.

·         Russia’s liberals have criticised the election as a farce, saying it was stage-managed by the Kremlin from the outset.

·         More than 109 million Russians are registered to vote in the elections.

·         Andreas Gross, head of a monitoring group from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) said  “The results of the presidential election ... are a reflection of the will of an electorate whose democratic potential was unfortunately not tapped’’

·         Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the continent's main election watchdog, decided not to monitor the presidential election because of Moscow's restrictions.

·         Only 300 international observers were monitoring the 96,000 polling stations

·         European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said he was confident that the EU-Russia "strategic partnership" would develop.

·         Russians election was country's third since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

·         The incumbent, Vladimir Putin, is stepping down at the end of two four-year terms, as prescribed by the constitution.

Rules

·         To win, a candidate must get over 50% of the vote. Failing that, the two highest polling candidates go through to a second round, to be held 21 days after the first.

·         In order to run, candidates had either to be put forward by a party in parliament, or collect the signatures of two million voters.

·         Polling is staggered across Russia's 11 time zones.

·         Around 109 million Russians are eligible to vote in Russia and abroad.

·         Who were standing?

  Dmitry Medvedev  A close ally of  Putin

  Gennady Zyuganov , 63, has been the leader of the Communist Party of Russia since 1993, and is a long-standing fixture of post-Soviet opposition politics.

  Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 61, is known for his brash and confrontational style.

  Andrei Bogdanov, 38, is little known in Russia, and seen as something of a mystery candidate.