Hacker News Reader

It is feeling threatened both by the US's clandestine involvement in the former Soviet states and its attempt to hamstring it's natural gas industry via the proxy war in Syria.

It has reason to speak and behave belligerantly.

If one considers the previous ~200 years of Russian Baltic/Eastern European hegemony to have experienced merely a 25 year interruption, perhaps Russia is feeling revanchist, that dangerous superset of expansionist which fuels the latter with patriotic imperative.

No it isn't.