Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, whose name derives from the Russian word for bear, has been showing his claws. On Tuesday, he used some of his harshest rhetoric to date, calling Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili a "political corpse" and suggesting the U.S. somehow instigated the war in Georgia to bolster Sen. John McCain (web|news|bio) 's presidential campaign. Does this tough talk mean Medvedev is eclipsing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as Russia's leading political figure? Not likely.

It has been Putin who throughout the crisis has set Russia's defiant tone - a line that others in the Kremlin team, from Medvedev down to Russia's NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin, have echoed, clarified and amplified.

It was Putin, for example, who first accused the U.S. of encouraging Georgia's military assault on South Ossetia last week, claiming it was engineered by the party in power - presumably the Republicans - to help their presidential candidate.

Putin was also the one who first suggested that U.S. aid deliveries to Georgia masked arms shipments. The statement was followed up by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who called for an arms embargo against Georgia.

Squaring his shoulders, looking grim and punctuating his speeches with uncharacteristically blunt language, the 42-year-old Medvedev has in recent months sounded like Putin, his predecessor and mentor. On Aug. 11, he used the words "lunatic" and "bastard" in talking about Saakashvili.

But Russia's prime minister has been the harshest and most consistent critic of the West in general and the U.S. in particular during the war and in its aftermath.

Putin, for example, accused the U.S. of fanning the flames of anti-Russian sentiment so it can maintain troops in Europe. The prime minister also compared Georgia's attack on South Ossetia with the organized execution of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian forces near Srebrenica in 1995.

And it was Putin who really got down and dirty in terms of rhetoric Thursday, when he accused a U.S. television correspondent of doing everything but defecate in his pants to interrupt a South Ossetian girl from criticizing Georgia during a live interview.

Putin may no longer occupy the president's office in the Kremlin, but many suspect he still calls Russia's shots as prime minister and the head of United Russia, which dominates Russia's national and regional governments.

He talks to Medvedev daily and has created a mini-cabinet of his own to shadow that of the president's.

Experts, business analysts and journalists here scrutinize every move and utterance by Medvedev and Putin, looking for signs of a rift between the two or for evidence that Medvedev's power is on the rise and Putin's is finally on the wane.

Any signs of a shift of power in Russia could send shockwaves through the world, thanks to Russia's surging economy, its role as a major energy supplier to Europe and its assertive new foreign policy. Many believe that, left to his own, Medvedev would be more sympathetic to Western political and economic reforms.

So far, though, there has been no seismic shift of power in the Kremlin. Only a few small tremors.

There certainly seems to be a strong rivalry between those who work with Putin in Russia's White House, the location of the prime minister's offices, and those who work with Medvedev in the Kremlin. This judgment is based on the whispers in the press and the comments of experts with links to one camp or the other.

But so far there are few signs Medvedev is chafing at the power sharing arrangement.

Certainly the Russian public does not view Medvedev as the senior figure in the Russian government. According to a July poll by the respected Levada center here, more than one-third of Russians thought Putin held real power in the country while just 9 percent thought Medvedev was the true leader.

Almost half, 47 percent, said they thought both shared power equally - the Kremlin's line, which is repeated in Russia's state-controlled television networks - while 8 percent didn't answer.

So far, Medvedev has not deviated from the policies laid down by Putin, who during his eight years as president sought to restore the dominance of the Kremlin at home and Russia's influence abroad.

Days after Medvedev agreed to sanctions against Zimbabwe with Group of Eight leaders in Japan in July, Russia vetoed United Nations sanctions against the African country. Someone, it appeared, had overruled the young Russian president.

In mid-August, Medvedev had a chance to break decisively with his predecessor when a Siberian court held a parole hearing for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former chief of Yukos Oil, now serving time in a Siberian prison on fraud and tax evasion charges.

Medvedev has repeatedly complained of the country's "legal nihilism" as part of his highly publicized campaign for court reform and against government corruption.

The case against Khodorkovsky was widely regarded as emblematic of Russia's weak court system - a court system critics charge was manipulated by the Kremlin to jail a powerful political foe and bring Yukos' rich assets under state control.

But the Siberian court denied the former oil tycoon parole on what appeared to be dubious grounds - that he failed to keep his hands behind his back during a stroll through the prison grounds.

Some urged Medvedev to pardon the former tycoon, but he declined to intervene.

Medvedev's recent harsh statements are a break with the usual pattern. After Putin's sometimes angry statements, Medvedev has generally followed up with softer language that nonetheless drives home Putin's point.

Following Putin's recent broadsides against the U.S. and warnings to Europe, Medvedev followed with a round-table interview Sunday with Russia's Kremlin-controlled television networks, in which he laid out Russia's five-point foreign policy.

He said that "regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbors."

Stripped of the soothing diplomatic euphemisms, Medvedev appeared to assert Russia's right to intervene militarily in what it regards its sphere of influence - a zone of "privileged interests" along its borders.

It was precisely the policy that Putin has long pursued.

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Douglas Birch, the Associated Press Moscow bureau chief, has covered the former Soviet Union since 2001.

Written By DOUGLAS BIRCH

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