Ambassador Taylor On Biden Sending American Troops Into Eastern Europe

Putin is keeping the pressure up, my guess is it helps him politically at home.  Brinksmanship is always aggrandizing for dictators with a society that has known little else in the way of being governed.  Putin will keep this up until objections at home are swept away then he'll calm down.  I think that Xi is operating from the same playbook.  But that's just my guess.

After all, no one can benefit from a nuclear holocaust, but brinksmanship, if well played can be very popular at home, just as any well-managed crisis.  Our foreign policy experts can handle this much better than any dictators can, no matter how skilled they are.

Dictatorships are known to be weak and sloppy just read the historical files.