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.
Now, if you think about the foreign policy of modern Kremlin it's just walking exactly the same steps.
Back in 1953 the East Berlin uprising was not about politics - it was about working conditions and Soviet-imposed work quotas. Same repeated in 1956 in Hungary, 1968 Czechoslovakia and 1981 in Poland.
All of these were suppressed by military interventions - just note, uprisings started not because they wanted to leave Eastern Bloc, but merely because they wanted better living conditions.
