Remember that the current Russia has less than half the population that the USSR had: 150 million vs 350. There is no way that it has the physical horsepower that it used to have. When leaders start yapping about an imaginary external threat it is ALWAYS to distract the home folks from their local problems. As has been noted Russia is a poorly run gas company trying to be a country and with the price of crude oil down Pootin no doubt feels he has to flex while he still has fuel for his Bears.
Pootin used all the transport he had to screw up Ukraine. He now doesn’t have enough left to get out of his own way. While he has the means to do random damage he ain’t actually going anyplace. Should he actually do anything dramatic and our own Grand Kenyan refused to respond we would have to have our own “depose” party——then respond at the melting point of Moscow.
"According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies’ "Military Balance" publication — a widely-used and well-respected unclassified compendium of information about the world’s armed forces — in 1989, just before the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union deployed a total of 64 divisions in what was then known as its “Western Theater of Military Operations.” These are the Russian forces that would have been hurled at NATO in an attack on Western Europe. They would have been reinforced by another 700,000 troops from the USSR’s three frontline Warsaw Pact allies, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. In all, more than 100 divisions would have been available for a drive into West Germany and beyond. The six countries committed to defending NATO’s front lines — West Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands — meanwhile deployed only 21 or so divisions in Germany. While NATO divisions were generally somewhat larger than their Warsaw Pact counterparts and reinforcement would have been forthcoming from the United States, the disparity along the East-West frontier was nonetheless huge.
Consider the situation today. East Germany no longer exists, while Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and every one of Russia’s other erstwhile Warsaw Pact partners are now members of NATO. So are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which in 1989 were parts of the Soviet Union itself. In 1989, the Red Army had almost a half-million troops and 27 maneuver divisions (plus enormous quantities of artillery and other units) on the territory of its three main allies. Today, it has a total of seven divisions in its entire Western Military District, all of which are based on its own territory. Indeed, the entire Russian army today boasts about 25 divisions, fewer than it had forward deployed in its Eastern European allies during the waning days of the Cold War.
Today, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany alone field more divisions than Russia has in its Western Military District. These countries are backstopped by the rest of NATO, including, of course, the United States."