would be dumb. Pretty good way to get most of the rest of the world against you (in other words, perfect place to play agent provocateur)

Hey Trump, are you gonna send in the US Navy to back up Putin's forces? I'll bet he'd pay you handsomely for a few Tomahawks.

Through bribery and via FIFA (surprise). USSRussia didn't have any credible football presence before the pute decided he wanted to "own" it.

What's next? Pute deciding he wants to shack up with Ivanka? (small price, easily minted.)

Or why otherwise (or perhaps "presumably&quot rational people would consider it thinking.

Does Russia seriously think that Ukraine would attack? Does Russia think that somehow having the troops there on the Uk side is somehow impinging on its territorial sovereignty?

It's the same with the SK/US war games in S. Korea and the unhinged N. Korean responses. Granted, Kim might well think that an attack was imminent. But the US was stronger in the past, esp. when taking into S. Korea, than N. Korea and, you know, nothing happened. Plus all the rhetoric about "we are practicing in case of attack by N. Korea," meaning that in some sense N. Korea was being taken seriously. If they meant their bellicose rhetoric entirely for domestic consumption, it should have come with a tagline that said so. In other words, the past is sufficient map to the future, all things being unchanged.

Same with Ukraine.

It's a sign of paranoid weakness, and the proper response would be to ridicule Putin's weak-minded paranoia and make it clear, in ways that get to the Russian populace, that it's just smoke being blown for the sake of Putin's power.

The thing about provokatsii is that it's the response that's the mistake and demonstrates an error in judgment. Or, perhaps, the reports were the provokatsiia, to get higher-ups to take an odd number of measures of a laendler as though it were in 4/4.