Russia's discontent

RUSSIA'S response to the election of Barack Obama came in an address Wednesday to Russian legislators by Vladimir Putin's handpicked successor, President Dmitry Medvedev - a discourse truffled with threats and allegations. If he is wise, Obama will resist the temptation to respond to the Russian rant. He should keep his own counsel because he is not yet president, because Medvedev was playing to a domestic audience, and because anything Obama might say now could complicate the task of undoing the knots President Bush has tied in US-Russian relations.

Medvedev threatened to station missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, near Poland, if the United States went ahead with Bush's plans to install a defective missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. He attributed the August war with Georgia to the "arrogant course of the American administration." And for good measure, he blamed America for Russia's market collapse and drastic capital flight, saying, "a local emergency on the US domestic market" was the cause of declining financial markets worldwide.