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 ...

Russia's government plans to lend the country's biggest banks 950 billion rubles ($36 billion) for at least five years in an attempt to unfreeze credit markets, according to a new plan announced by President Dmitry Medvedev this morning. State-run OAO Sberbank and VTB Group, will get 500 billion rubles and 200 billion rubles respectively.Some 450 billion roubles ($17.19 billion) of the 950 billion rouble subordinate loans package for banks will come from one of the National Wealth Funds according to Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on Tuesday. Russia's two oil wealth funds totalled $189.7 billion as of Oct. 1.The Russian authorities, who are currently grappling with the worst financial crisis since the government's debt default in 1998, have already pledged more than $150 billion for banks and companies through loans and tax benefits (see details in this post here). Stocks rose ...