Nothing bar a sudden and unexpected death was going to stop Dmitri Medvedev becoming Russia’s next president.

His crushing victory in the country’s March 2 election became a certainty more than two months earlier when incumbent Vladimir Putin endorsed his candidacy. From that moment on there could only be one outcome: victory for a man who has spent much of the last 17 years taking orders from Putin.

The only real question before the election was what Medvedev’s margin of victory would be. The only question now is if and how his leadership will differ from that of Putin.

After eight years of an oil-fuelled political and economic resurgence, Putin is master of all he surveys. He could easily have stayed on as president if it weren’t for a constitutional ban on anyone serving more than two back-to-back terms. And he could, if he wanted, return as president in future years.

Taken at his word, Putin will now serve as prime minister in Medvedev’s government after his former protégé is inaugurated in May. Some Putin loyalists have even predicted the two men could take turns swapping the premiership and the presidency for years if not decades ahead.

That may be wishful thinking but what is clear is that Medvedev has a lot to prove even if he is faced with an electorate that is less than demanding. He may, at the startlingly young age of 42, be president of the world’s largest country but the truth is nobody really knows who the mild-mannered former lawyer is.

Not that he is short of nicknames. Putin’s younger brother, Putin’s son, Putin’s mini-me, the Kremlin dwarf – few of them have been flattering. The one quality which appears to have qualified Medvedev in the eyes of Putin for the country’s highest office is his total loyalty and his proven track record of implementing other people’s decisions.

Can he shrug off Putin’s imposing shadow in the years to come or will he remain a hostage to the man to whom he owes everything? It will be difficult, at least in the early stages, to do the former, and all too easy to settle for the latter.

If he is his own man he will have to work hard to define himself. It’s worth noting though that Putin was also written off as a spineless yes man when he began to emerge from Boris Yeltsin’s boozy shadow in 1999. In the Byzantine world of Kremlin politics, crown princes such as Medvedev now and Putin then have little choice but to act submissively before being let off the leash.

Some of Medvedev’s past statements do not inspire confidence. “I am a part of the state machine,” he once said in earnest. He is also hidebound by the fact that the roadmap for Russia’s future has already been laid out in a package of nationalist-tinged policies called “Putin’s Plan.” The country’s budget has been drawn up for several years ahead too and changing strategic direction would in any case be like forcing a supertanker to swerve.

Talking before the election, Medvedev made it clear in any case that he was not going to make profound policy changes. “Any seeker of this position should indicate that if he is elected, he will spoil nothing,” he said, referring to Putin’s policies.

If Medvedev wants to distinguish himself from Putin he has also chosen strange way of doing so – by imitating his mentor in a fashion worthy of one of Hollywood’s most committed method actors.

It would be funny if it were not bizarre. Putin has a penchant for wearing all-black outfits to shore up his tough guy image, usually with a black polo neck sweater and black blazer. It is a look that Medvedev has been keen to copy. It gets odder. Medvedev appears to have mastered the art of imitating Putin’s clipped speech, his walk, the way he places his hands on a table, his fondness for reeling off “how clever am I” statistics and his technique of silencing subordinates with terse semi-comic put-downs. The fact that the two men are both on the short side completes the comparison.

“He reminds me of Putin,” is a common refrain when Russians gather round a TV set to watch Medvedev’s usually dry technocratic monologues. Medvedev appears to have worked hard to create a likeness. Putin famously likes to swim twice a day and so too – by what is unlikely to be a coincidence – does Medvedev. Pictures of him from just a few years ago reveal the face of a dumpy bureaucrat. Now, his suits hang off his lean shoulders as if balanced on metal hangers.

Much has been made too of Medvedev’s supposedly liberal credentials and the fact that unlike Putin he does not have a background in the Russian intelligence services. But analysts urge caution – liberality is a relative concept, not least in Russia where the centre of political gravity is ultra-conservative on certain key issues when viewed through a European prism.

Most commentators believe Medvedev’s liberal credentials are a public relations sleight of hand designed to make him more palatable to the West. Only time will tell, they say, whether he really does have a liberal bone in his 5ft 4inch frame.

What is clearer is that he will have to flesh out his commitment to democracy in deeds rather than just words if he is to be taken seriously. He won plaudits at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2007 by saying that Russian democracy needed no special qualification, a gentle rebuff of a top Kremlin ideologist who has propagated the idea of a special form of Russian “sovereign democracy” that has little in common with Western democracy.

But the manner in which Medvedev rose to the pinnacle of power in Russia dovetails awkwardly with that statement and his frequently trumpeted liberal credentials. The election campaign that installed him in the Kremlin was after all a campaign in name only. There was no intrigue, no suspense, and no competition. In fact the only uncertainty was whether other candidates might pull out in protest, so one-sided and lacklustre was the contest.

Medvedev refused to participate in public debates with his opponents saying he was too busy discharging his duties as a first deputy prime minister, hardly the behaviour of a committed democrat. His only three opponents were in any case made up of politicians who looked more like they were making up the numbers.

Gennady Zyuganov, the ageing leader of the Communist Party, has probably fought and lost his last presidential election. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalist clown, is not even taken seriously by many of his own voters. And the other candidate – a self-styled liberal called Andrei Bogdanov rumoured to be on the Kremlin’s pay – was notable for the fact that hardly anyone beyond Moscow’s apocalyptic ring road had ever heard of him.

Buoyed by the might of the state TV machine which slavishly followed his every move down to nights out at the cinema and visits to war memorials in former Stalingrad, Medvedev couldn’t go wrong. In December pollsters put his popularity rating at just 24 percent – less than one month before the election that figure had risen to over eighty percent. Not bad for someone who said he was too busy to campaign.

His democratic credentials have also sometimes seemed contradictory. In the watershed case involving the effective re-nationalisation of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s oil giant Yukos he first urged restraint only to later say that nobody should be above the law. What he really thinks on the subject is an enigma.

He was also chairman of energy titan Gazprom’s board when the company became embroiled in politically charged gas disputes with countries such as Ukraine. And he was in charge of Putin’s office when many democratic reforms were effectively junked.

In electoral terms he has been helped though by the fact that as a first deputy prime minister he was in charge of one of the most vote-winning facets of Putin’s policies, the so-called “national projects”. Since 2005, his job has been to channel the country’s fabulous oil and gas riches into raising living standards and improving agriculture, housing, education and healthcare. The jury is still out on how well he did since the projects are ongoing and not due to finish anytime soon but the role gave him plenty of decent photo opportunities visiting schools, hospitals and farms. He showed a softer, warmer albeit more awkward side than Putin on such visits despite his attempts to imitate his boss.

Little that stands out is known about his background. A native of St Petersburg like Putin and many of his top lieutenants, he qualified as a lawyer, married a girl he met at school, has one son, and likes British hard rock bands Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.

He has worked on and off for Putin in various roles: as his campaign manager, as the head of his presidential administration, as his legal adviser when the two worked together in St Petersburg city hall in the 1990s, and in his cabinet.

One of the things that alarm some analysts though is the fact that he has next to no foreign policy experience. He may have sat in on many foreign policy-related discussions during his career but here again he has everything to prove. Some believe his arrival will denote a softening of what has become an increasingly hard-line foreign policy and a gentle rapprochement with the West. That, say such analysts, is why Putin chose him.

What we do know is that his job will be to consolidate the gains of Putin’s two terms. “We need decades of stable development that our country has been deprived of,” he said in one of his few campaign speeches.

The answer to other key questions such as whether he represents Putinism with a human face or is Putin-lite will have to remain unanswered for a little longer.