Russia

What the Russians have been doing is slowly testing the West, playing on the gray zone of the rules, see what the West will do, and now there’s been a response...I think the ball is very much in the Russian court to decide: Are we going to continue this confrontation strategy of trying to test the West, or are we going to scale it back?

Russia is much more dependent on trade than the Soviet Union was...This gives the West more leverage over Russia than over the Soviet Union...Western sanctions over Russia’s 2014 seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula and its support for separatist forces who seized territory in eastern Ukraine have hurt the Russian economy but caused only negligible impact in Europe.