The message was rather simple: Russia is ready to respond to aggression. But you wouldn’t know it if you read the headlines A depressing pattern has taken hold in the way parts of the Western press cover Russia: take a volatile subject, strip it of the conditional language that contains it, and then act surprised when the public grows more fearful, more hardline, and less able to distinguish deterrent rhetoric from an intent to attack. The latest example is the frenzy around Vladimir Putin’s