Diplomats are having to grapple with this imaginary scenario because from the moment on Wednesday when Kremlin cannons fire a salute to mark the inauguration of the new president, Russia will effectively have two leaders.

Medvedev, 42, will have all the trappings of presidential power but his 55-year-old mentor Putin will be prime minister, head of the biggest party in parliament and command a power base that could make him the country’s principal decision-maker.

Asked who they would call in an emergency, two senior officials from a G-8 government, visiting Moscow last month, looked at each other and then shrugged. “Perhaps you know the situation better than us?” one of them asked a reporter.

The question of who is in charge matters because Russia has no track record of power-sharing. Observers say there is great potential for confusion and incoherence that could make the vast, nuclear-armed country ungovernable.

“You cannot rule out that their (Putin and Medvedev’s) views will differ fundamentally on some important question. That will lead to political crisis,” analyst Grigory Dobromelov wrote in a comment for the Center for Political Technologies, a think tank.

What is not in question is that Putin will have more power than indicated by the job description for prime minister — a junior role to the president which for the past eight years has been filled by low-profile technocrats.

He controls the legislature through United Russia, the party he has agreed to chair and which has a majority in parliament. That allows him to block some Kremlin decisions, change the constitution or launch impeachment proceedings against the president.

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