President Dmitry Medvedev's embrace of Twitter has spawned a new twist in Russia's rich tradition of political humor: a mock account lampooning the tech-savvy leader and his uphill battle to modernize the nation. Just days after Medvedev sent his first microblog from Twitter's offices in California last month, an account called KermlinRussia appeared - and swiftly drew almost 1,500 followers. By Monday it featured 130 tweets, most of them reacting to entries from Medvedev's KremlinRussia page. Several of the mock account's entries predicted, playfully but pointedly, that the Kremlin's modernization efforts are doomed by Russian bureaucracy and corruption. “One needs to understand that money given to modernization and innovation will be spent on corruption and swindling,” one tweet said. A few tweets took aim at Medvedev himself, including one critical reference to the daily ritual of stopping traffic to let the president's convoy hurtle through the city.
