Yeah. You can bet food money that "we" been doing/are doing pretty much the same things since pretty much forever.

These 4D chess between States must be as old as time itself.

Come on man. By the looks of things, no they won't stop in Ukraine for a good long while.

But if Russia couldn't (or didn't want to) even sweep across Ukraine like it was nothing, they are many light years away to pose any kind of "existential" threat to the Western world (nuclear war aside, of course).