I mean, I doubt that he’d move against NATO directly, but that’s got nothing to do with his statements. He spent years swearing up and down that he wasn’t going to attack Ukraine, too.

If he could get away with it one way or another, yeah, I think that he’d give it a try. I just doubt that he’s going to have a realistic opportunity.

Also, while it’s probably not ISW’s principal interest, Russia under Putin did start conducting assassinations on the soil of several NATO members, and I am not at all sure that Russia will refrain from that in the future.

• You had the polonium and the attempted Novichok assassination in the UK. In the case of the attempted Skripal hit, I distinctly remember reading a quote from Mike Pompeo about how we had specifically warned Moscow to knock off the assassinations shortly before it went through. When that happened shortly afterwards, he said that everyone was pretty pissed off with Putin.

• You had the attempted assassination of that Bulgarian arms dealer, Emilian Gebrev.

• You had the assassination via shooting of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Germany.

• You had – and the US did not release information on this at the time – an attempted assassination on US soil of Aleksandr Poteyev.

That’s stuff that was generally considered off limits during the Cold War. You do espionage, but you don’t do hits on each other’s soil. The CIA’s assessment in the mid-Cold War:

https://www.cia.gov/static/Soviet-Use-of-Assassination.pdf

Since World War II, and especially in the years since Stalin’s death, assassination attempts abroad have become increasingly rare. Currently the emphasis in the executive action field is placed on sabotage and sabotage planning, rather than terrorism against individuals. The Soviets now apparently resort to murder only in the case of persons considered especially dangerous to the regime and who, for one reason or another, cannot be kidnaped.

In this connection, comments made by state security defectors Petr Deryabin and Yurv Rastvorov in 1954 about what the Soviets would or would not do are still of interest. Both believed that the Soviets would murder one of their officials on the verge of defecting if that were the only way of preventing the act. The same would apply to a Soviet official who had just defected, if thereby state secrets could be preserved, and if they believed that killing him would not bring about a more adverse situation in terms of politics and propaganda than already existed. Deryabin and Rastvorov doubted, however, that the Soviets would murder an official who had been in non-Communist hands long enough to have been exploited for intelligence and propaganda purposes. While both granted that in particular cases the Soviets might go to any extreme, they both believed, generally speaking, that the adverse propaganda resulting from such an act would negate its original purpose. On the other hand, Khokhlov, who might have been in a better position to know, has stated without qualification that the Soviets would continue to assassinate defectors in the future. The threat of Soviet executive action against defectors is also considered a real one by Reino Hayhanen, who defected from the KGB in 1957. A still more recent Soviet intelligence source also believes that standard Soviet practice is to mount a kidnaping or assassination operation “through all intelligence opportunities” against defectors from the Soviet intelligence services. Deryabin and Rastvorov further agreed that the Soviets, without hesitation, would forcibly return to the USSR someone on the verge of defecting at a mission abroad. This was borne out by the aforementioned Strygin and Zelenovskiy cases. Deryabin and Rastvorov also believed that the same policy would apply to a Soviet official who had just defected, or one who had been in non-Communist hands long enough to have been exploited for intelligence and propaganda purposes, if the capability existed for returning him physically to the USSR.

Lastly, Deryabin believed that the assassination of an Allied official would be highly unlikely and probably unprofitable. He also doubted that the Soviets would attempt to kidnap any U.S. officials unless they were particularly knowledgeable. Such an incident would not be worth the trouble for an average official, but an important person conceivably would have sufficient information to make it worthwhile.