In Russia's system it is apparent that Medvedev needs his own power base and this appears to be what he is trying to create. We should not overestimate the chances for democracy, although this could injure elite cohesion and lead to further reforms. For now, however, this initiative, if it takes place, is another Kremlin party, not an independent expression of autonomous social forces. That clearly is too much to stomach. 

Relying on Chubais and Surkov is relying on "gosudarstvenniki" rather than on public actors who need to and can prove themselves in public. This is another of those gambits by which Russian reformers believe they can achieve liberal ends by autocratic means and it has never worked before. 

OAO Rosneft, Russia's largest oil producer, may focus on Asia, rather than Europe, after Yukos Capital Sarl won a ruling freezing 425 million pounds ($648 million) in U.K. bank accounts, according to an analyst.

"It corals the company and ensures that the growth focus stays towards Asia rather than the west," UralSib Financial Corp Chief Strategist Chris Weafer said by e-mail today. (...)

"The state dictates Rosneft's growth strategy and, at least for now, that is almost entirely oriented towards China," Weafer said.

Russia acts with open hostility toward efforts by Central and Eastern European countries to find historical truth. Putin has emphasized on several occasions that Russia will not take responsibility for crimes committed by the Soviet Union in Central or Eastern Europe. At the same time, he has expressed his admiration for Stalin and his regret of "the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century": the fall of the Soviet Union. More than one-fifth of the Russian population considers the NGO Memorial's documented proof regarding the scale of Stalinist terror as untrue. It is with great justification that the Sakharov Award, given every year by the European Parliament, went to Memorial for fighting to condemn Stalin's crimes and expose human rights violations in modern day Russia.

When assessing democracy's current retreat in Russia - there is no other way to refer to the state's control of the press, the narrowing of representative government, the lack of effort to critically re-evaluate Stalinism and Bolshevism, the war in Chechnya and other human rights abuses - we must realize that, given long-term EU interests, it is not possible to sacrifice values and succumb to the temptation of pragmatism. Whenever Europe has sacrificed basic values in the name of realpolitik, dramatic and tragic consequences have followed.

Cyberspace is being nationalised rapidly. In some parts of the world, this has been going on for a while. Russia has been running a programme known by the delightfully sinister acronym Sorm-2 (System of operational investigative activities) since the late 1990s. This ensures that a copy of every single data byte that goes into, out of or around the country ends up in a vast storage vault run by the Federal Security Service. You can read about atrocities committed in Chechnya if you wish but you can be confident that somebody will be looking over your digital shoulder.

The president and chief executive of the Sochi 2014 organising committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko, said the Zorb had been chosen to represent a new Russia.

"The transparency of Zorbs also reflect the open, accessible and inclusive society that Sochi 2014 Games is helping to build," he said.

But inside the Russian government, the trend was going in the opposite direction. Medvedev and other liberals still felt trust for Obama and seemed ready to meet him halfway. But conservatives -- mainly old-school apparatchiks, security chiefs and former KGB officers like Putin -- began to express their doubts about the reset in relations. "It's been frustrating," the U.S. senior official tells TIME on condition of anonymity. "We came in with an aggressive reset mentality, and it was not necessarily shared by everyone in the Russian government. The Russians are overwhelmed by all the things we want to do tomorrow, and they say, Let's take time."

Rogozin puts the matter more bluntly. "Medvedev sincerely believes that Obama can be trusted," he tells TIME. "But that doesn't mean this opinion is shared at every level, especially the levels where the implementation of their agreements is borne out." This reality -- the disconnect between what Medvedev pledges and what Russia does -- has eroded the spirit behind the reset strategy as well as its practical objectives.