Leadership shuffle in the Kremlin next year with President Medvedev and PM Putin swapping jobs will not change Moscow’s “aggressive” policy to its neighbors as it was Putin who was in charge anyway, Giga Bokeria, the secretary of Georgian National Security Council, told The Cable, a blog of The Foreign Policy magazine, on September 27.

“It was clear throughout this time that Prime Minister Putin was in charge. The Russian policy toward Georgia and its other neighbors has not changed and unfortunately there's no sign it will change in the immediate future,” he said. “It will be aggressive as it was.”

“For some analysts who had some illusions that there was some internal struggle, that we always thought were unserious, this is an eye opener now,” Bokeria said. “It's an insult to Russian citizens the way this has been presented to them.”