Ending speculation that he had another surprise up his sleeve in this tumultuous election season, Putin also said he would not–as had been widely expected–seek to strengthen the post of prime minister at the expense of Russia’s powerful presidency.

Putin last week said First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was his choice for the presidency, ensuring support by Putin’s United Russia party. A day later, Medvedev said if he were elected president, he would offer Putin the prime minister’s job.

“If the citizens of Russia show trust in Dmitry Medvedev and elect him the new president, I would be ready to continue our joint work as prime minister, without changing the distribution of authority,” Putin said. Later, the party nominated Medvedev as its candidate.

And so, Putin’s cult of personality rolls on. Just in case you think these developments really don’t matter to us in the grand scheme of things, the Financial Times offers reasons to reconsider being so sanguine:

US officials are worried that Vladimir Putin is moving towards one-man rule in Russia and that, as a result, disputes over Kosovo and Georgia are more likely to flare out of control.

Washington sees this week’s announcements that Mr Putin would be asked to serve as prime minister by Dmitry Medvedev, his preferred successor, and of Mr Medvedev’s likely succession itself, as signs of the outgoing Russian president’s ever-greater personalised dominance of Russian politics.

In the wake of Russia’s pullout this week from a landmark arms control treaty, tensions over US plans for missile defence in Europe and American criticism of Russia’s recent parliamentary elections, relations between Moscow and Washington are markedly worse than at the start of President George W. Bush’s time in office. In 2001, Mr Bush declared he had looked in Mr Putin’s eye and gained “a sense of his soul”.

“I keep thinking of centralisation that goes on until there’s only one-man rule,” said one senior US official. “If there are no strong institutions, then every succession, every transition, is a systemic crisis.”

To be sure, we shouldn’t be frantic with fear over what is going on in Russia. Jim Hoagland points out Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s sober and accurate view concerning Russia:

. . . [Gates’s] effort to deny the Kremlin (and other foreign critics) an easy enemy stemmed from “two motives,” he continued: “We are trying to expand cooperation when we can and to make clear that it is not the U.S.’s fault when we can’t.”

Foreign officials who have discussed Russia separately with Rice and Gates note that while she refers frequently to “the red lines” that Moscow has to observe to stabilize a difficult relationship, Gates emphasizes that Russia no longer represents a significant threat to U.S. goals or security. He quickly moves on to the problems of Afghanistan or Iraq, where he is well positioned to be sharply critical of allies for falling short on their commitments.

“We are not locked in a global confrontation with Russia,” as the United States was with the Soviet Union, Gates responded when I asked whether he or the Russians had changed more since the Cold War. “The world doesn’t have blocs anymore. We are in a multipolar world now.”

That we are. But as the Financial Times story makes clear, Russia is entering a situation where it is facing severe institutional problems–made more stark and forbidding by the creation and cultivation of one-man rule. Because Putin is working so hard to augment his own power rather than augmenting the strength and viability of Russian democratic institutions, he is priming Russia for a series of administrative, organizational and political crises, a combination of which could significantly set back political and social life in Russia. In the meantime, thanks to the authoritarian system Putin is working on creating for his own benefit, Russia will be less transparent, decision-making will be less clear to the outside world and the ability of the United States and other countries to make accurate decisions concerning Russia will suffer.

All of which, needless to say, is not good at all.