President Vladimir Putin today named the little-known head of a financial market watchdog as his prime minister in a surprise move that kept Russians guessing over who would succeed him in the Kremlin.
Mr Putin had earlier accepted Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov's resignation and then left Moscow for a
Head of Russia's Financial Monitoring Service Viktor Zybkov who was named as Russia's new prime minister by Mr Putin.
planned trip to the Volga region without publicly disclosing a replacement.
It was left to the speaker of the State Duma (parliament), Boris Gryzlov, to announce that Mr Putin had nominated Viktor Zubkov, the 65-year-old head of the Federal Financial Monitoring Service as new prime minister.
The agency's main duty is to fight money laundering and Mr Zubkov worked with Mr Putin in the St Petersburg mayor's office during the 1990s.
The move confounded analysts' predictions that Mr Putin would elevate one of the most widely fancied candidates to succeed him to the prime minister's post as a stepping stone to the top Kremlin job.
That was the sequence of events under former president Boris Yeltsin, who made Mr Putin prime minister in 1999 before naming him acting president months later.
Vyacheslav Nikonov, who heads the Politika Foundation think-tank, said Mr Putin's decisions on appointments had seldom been guessed correctly and predicted that the Yeltsin scenario was unlikely to repeat itself this time.
"I do not exclude that another politician can become the successor, including all those named (as possibles) in the last few months," he said. "I do not believe Mr Zubkov's nomination means it is he who will succeed Mr Putin."
Conventional wisdom in Moscow had been that Sergei Ivanov, a close Putin ally and one of two first deputy prime ministers, would be named prime minister as a step towards becoming the Kremlin's favoured presidential candidate next year.