We’ll have more commentary coming soon on this, but it appears that President Dmitry Medvedev has greeted the historic election of Barack Obama with a telegram of congratulations (“I expect to develop a constructive dialogue with you on the basis of confidence and respect for each other’s interests“) while simultaneously issuing a direct threat with an announcement that he would deploy Iskander missiles to Russia’s Kaliningrad region, which lies between Poland and the ex-Soviet republic of Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. He also used his state of the nation speech to again blame the United States for the war in the Caucasus and the global financial crisis. As Joe Biden predicted, the new president is immediately being tested even months before inauguration. As we predicted, Russia would be among the first to do it (although Israel also celebrated the election by bombing Gaza). Other voices in the Russian administration are reaching for more soothing tones of cooperation of the new U.S. government.