I think for the Russians it's all sabre-rattling (as you detailed above in previous examples), as they have been doing on a regular basis, in a bid to rally nationalism to quell internal dissent.
But...
There is always the danger that, against their intentions, events could spiral out of their control and lead to a hot war.
After the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, the nations of Europe thought of it as a trivial affair that would be worked out diplomatically. But to their astonishment, it instead led to World War I.
I was very concerned about the war following the breakup of Yogoslavia, between Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia in the early 1990's, that similar to the cause of WW I, threatened to expand into a wider regional war, or even (as NATO and the Russians were pulled in) a global war.
Against the visible "reasons" for war, it seems to just happen when one side wants a war badly enough, and the logic of exactly why it occurred is improvised by historians after the fact.
