Putin threatens to do what he's been doing anyway since gaining office, only more:
Mr. Putin, in an interview at his country residence outside Moscow, said he considers U.S. plans to build an eastern European anti-missile site to shoot down Iranian missiles a provocation aimed at Russia.
Asked what he might do to retaliate, he said he would return Russia to the Cold War status where missiles were aimed at European targets.
Russia, a neighbor you can count on. To threaten, intimidate, and subjugate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin poses a dilemma: Even as he has isolated Russia from the world by burning relations with allies and suppressing democracy, his popularity at home has grown.
This is what happens when a population has had all the individual initiative beaten out of it. You get a chance to better yourself, but find the chance has high risk, the infrastructure is broken, and the government does everything it can to rob you and discourage success. So you go back to the crappy, third-rate life you had before, where as long as you shut up, the government gives you cut-rate booze and small allowance of low grade food good enough to keep you working at the factory. Learned helplessness on a national scale.
We'd be better off helping the old Eastern Bloc states build huge fences on their borders with Russia just to make the point of how much they're loved, then help upgrade their armed forces as much a possible. Given the way below replacement level birth rates in Russia, it'll be virtually uninhabited in a century anyway.
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