This is worse than the Cold War.

Mo SHOW the deportation of many Russian diplomats from the United States, countries across Europe and beyond, has raised again the question of whether the world is returning to its place during the Cold War. The alarming response from some to Russia is: No, but the situation is in some ways, even more unpredictable.

Despite all tensions, conflicts with the third, and the risk of nuclear war marking mutual relations Moscow and the West for decades, each party knew, especially near the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, what it should expect. Each had a level of faith, the other side acting reasonably and predictablely.

Russia's unstable state of relations with the outside world today, exacerbated by a nervous agent attack on a former spy living in Britain, however, makes the diplomatic climate of the Cold War seem very calm, says Ivan I. Kurilla, an expert on Russian-American relations who recalls a paralyzing period of distrust that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

If you look for similarities to what is happening, it is not the Cold War that can explain events, but Russia's first revolutionary regime”, which regularly killed opponents abroad, says Kurilla, historian at the European University in St. Petersburg.

He says Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, had no interest in spreading a new ideology and promoting the world revolution, unlike the early Bolsheviks, but Russia under Putin “became a revolutionary regime, in terms of international relations”.

From the angle of the Kremlin, the United States is the one that overturned previous rates when President Bush withdrew the United States from the anti-balistic anti-missile agreement, an important Cold War-era treaty in 2002.

Russia, says Kurilla, does not like America's dominated rule rules since then, “and wants to change them”.

However, a rule Russia has consistently accepted is the principle of reciprocity, and the Kremlin made it clear Monday that following the assessment of the extent of the damage to the foreign diplomatic body, it will respond to the expulsions of Western diplomats from Russia.

The Russian Parliament also intervened, as Foreign Affairs Commission deputy chairman Alexei Chepa told the Interfax news agency that Russia would not bow to “The diplomatic battle <x1nd> against the West. Russia, he said, “will not allow itself to be reached, the more they try to intimidate us, the tougher our response will be”.

When Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats this month in response to the attack by nervous agents in Salisbury, England, Moscow not only expelled a similar number of British diplomats but ordered the closure of British Council, an organisation promoting British culture and language.

While denying a role in poisoning on March 4th of Sergei V. Scribal, a former spy and his daughter Yulia, both of whom have been heavy in the hospital, Russia in recent years has increased its activity in violating international norms, especially with the annexing of the Crimea in 2014, the first time since 1945, that European borders are forced to remake.

The attack on the Scripals was another time, at least according to Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, who denounced the action as the first “attack with a nervous agent in Europe since World War II”.

Kadri Liik, a researcher at the European Council for Foreign Relations, said it is frustrated by the attack with the chemical agent. Liik said he had expected Putin, who won a fourth large majority mandate on March 18th, would back away from these actions, during those under the Constitution, should be his last six years in power.

Mr. Putin, she said, may not be predictable, but usually follows what he considers very clear logic. “Putin does not stir just to enjoy, but because he is Putin and he can”, she said.

Each time Russia has been accused of having hand in acts such as confiscating Ukraine's government buildings in Crime or hitting in 2014 of a Malaysian passenger plane over eastern Ukraine, where nearly 300 people were killed, Moscow has reacted with a mixture of self-claration, strong denial and conspiracy theories, which take the blame elsewhere.

In the case of Salisbury poisoning, Russia's denials became so baroque that even state media found it difficult to convey.

After officials denied any Russian role and insisted that neither Russia nor the Soviet Union had ever developed Novichok, the nervous agent identified by Britain as a substance used against the Scripals, a state-controlled news agency, published an interview with a Russian scientist who said he had helped develop a chemical weapons system called Novichok-5. The agency later changed the article, replacing the mention of Novichok by the scientist, with a claim that the “chemical weapons development program from the USSR was not called úNovichok”.

The attempted murder of Mr. Scribal on British soil, however, was the “block of straw that broke the back of the camel”, says Vladimir Inzemtsev, a Russian researcher at the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw. The Western leaders finally decided that it has gone where it no longer holds”, because Moscow has played the denial game so many times, and has done nothing to whiteen the truth, he said.

NDruste by Soviet leaders during the Cold War, he added, Putin does not follow an ideology or fixed rules, but is willing to follow any policy “gribly”, however taboo they may be, with the goal of “to undermine the existing European rule”, while while while while simultaneously insisting that Russia is the victim rather than the aggressor.

When the United Nations in 2015 proposed an international court to investigate the MH-17 air disaster a year earlier on the territory controlled by the armed rebels from Russia to eastern Ukraine, Moscow used veto at the UN Security Council to block this action, the only member of the Council that rejected the investigation.

Ian Bond, a former British diplomat in Moscow who is now the director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform in London, said Russia's frequent, untrustworthy denials had made him “like the boy who called the wolf, wolf!”.

If you keep throwing crazy conspiracy theories, people in the end will wonder if what you're saying is just another crazy Russian denial”, he says.

He says that diplomacy during the Cold War, even when it involved hostile acts, sought to pursue a relatively calm and orderly routine. This is no longer the case, he adds, noting that the Russian Embassy in London and the Foreign Ministry in Moscow have issued statements and posts in Twitter, mocking Britain as a former powerless power, mocking the poisoning of Salisbury as the so-called “case Sergei Scripal”.

President Putin, adds Bond, “is not trying to promote the international revolution, but he is its major destroyer” and enjoys putting on the gallows he puts on foreign governments, violating established rates.

While Russia may have been surprised at the extent of the expulsions co-ordinated by Britain's allies on Monday, it was clear that it had predicted something. A few hours before they were notified, he jumped on the offensive.

Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, has posted a message on Facebook, mocking the European Union for showing solidarity with Britain at a time when London is negotiating its exit from the bloc. Britain, she wrote, is “exploiting the solidarity factor to impose on the remaining Union, a deterioration of relations with Russia”.

While President Trump has expressed a strange approach to Putin and has increased expectations of improved relations, the Russian leader has always been more cautious. Meanwhile, deep distrust appears to have been strengthened Monday by Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatolia Antonov, who told the Interfax news agency that “what the United States is doing today is destroying what little remains in Russia- USA”

Despite the unpredictableness under Putin, the possibility of nuclear conflict between the Russians and the West -- the most formidable aspect of the Cold War -- appears to have not increased. Weapons control deals reached since the 1970s continue to be respected except for the 1972 anti-balistic treaty, known as the Treaty ABM, which Bush abandoned 30 years later.

Mr. Bush's decision, demanded by several American allies, paved the way, in Moscow's view, for a situation where everyone is free to do what they want in international relations, which has increased the difficulties of the US and Russia, to regain the confidence developed by President Ronald Reagan and the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, 1980s.

In a speech to the nation in February, Putin discovered what he called a new generation of long-range rockets (undesignable”, but then in an interview for The NBC, he blamed Washington for pushing Moscow into another arms race, ignoring the status quo of the Cold War.

If you speak of arms race, it started when the US withdrew from the ABM” Treaty, he said.

In the face of Moscow's disturbing actions in the 1920s, Britain and other European countries “did not know how to respond, and it took 10 years to find out how to deal with Moscow”, says St. Petersburg historian Curilla.

In Britain's case, the main power of time and the first Western country to recognise the Soviet Union, the process has current echoes. She recognized the Bolshevic government in 1924 but then expelled Soviet diplomats and laid shutters on their embassy three years later, after police discovered what they were told was a Soviet spy network aimed at sowing chaos. / NYT