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4. Russia attempting to throw more tension into the US relationships with Cuba and China. Historically that wouldn't be unusual at all, for Russia to screw with the US in such a way. In real terms the US is in a cold war with Russia (and has been for a decade). The US recently killed hundreds of their citizens that were acting as foreign proxy militia, in Syria; I would imagine there's all sorts of tit for tat going on between the two countries. We're into a new era of the large powers messing with each other again.

If that were the case re Russia, however, I'd have expected to see a lot more cases in China, to really push it.

Shoddy spy tech, on one side or the other, is the most likely cause imo.

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Worth noting that the incident to which you are referring was a case of non-military Russians employed by Assad as mercenaries, who attempted to attack US forces in Syria. The Russian military and the US military in Syria are in fairly close communication, and both are taking pains not to strike each other. The Russian government likely does not care much about the rogue mercenaries who made a dumb decision to attack Americans, and certainly are not going to retaliate by attacking other Americans in other countries. Considering that the attack on the Americans is the kind of thing that could kickstart a war, I’d almost guess that the Russian government would retaliate against the private security contractor for nearly destabilizing the situation and almost provoking a US counter attack against Russian military forces.

That's why you'd use a cut-out: plausible deniability. Russia has attempted and/or carried out multiple hits on NATO soil in this exact manner, including one with a novel nerve agent.

The Wagner Group (the mercenaries you speak of) are considered by some experts to simply be a group controlled by the Russian Government for "plausible" (nothing plausible about it though) deniability.

Also see: Little Green Men in Ukraine.

I don’t think any qualified experts would make that claim, but happy to be proven wrong if there is any real information about how the group works. Unfortunately it’s hard to learn anything about this because the discourse is nothing but pundits with an agenda. Even if that’s the case though, the events in question make no sense strategically, so it makes no difference.

> In real terms the US is in a cold war with Russia (and has been for a decade).

At least two; the new Cold War was talked about a little bit before, but became undeniable during the Balkan crisis and resulting international peacekeeping missions.

It got less public attention (at least on the US side) when the focus was on US hot wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, but it didn't go away.

I feel like this would make sense for Russia and Cuba given the power dynamic, but the risk of being exposed by China... I would consider that too high a risk for Russia to piss off the other economic super power.

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