Russian gov has quietly informed US embassy in Moscow it will remove the ban on employing Russian staff it announced with a lot of media coverage as a "reprisal" for expulsions of Russian diplomats in response to GRU activity on the ground and the Internet.
When US embassy said it will then only offer services to US citizens and suspends issuing visas to Russians, Kremlin quietly stepped back. Which kind of shows that Russian bargain is quite weak in such international sabre rattling.
And while some of the Russian military interventions were clearly a desperate struggle for a few more gas sales (like in Syria, whose sole purpose was to prevent building a pipeline from Quatar to EU), most of them did not make any sense from Russian interest's point of view - the war in Ukraine or Georgia makes absolutely no sense from business point of view, it's just about turning some areas into military-controlled blackholes.
