But a failure to impose a sufficiently high price on the kind of activity that the Kremlin is accused of - pumping out disinformation to influence minds, cyber attacks, even potentially putting bounties on the heads of NATO troops in Afghanistan - risks normalising a certain level of hostile behaviour that should not be tolerated.
Of course, Russia denies meddling in last year's US election or orchestrating a cyber hack that used a technology company called SolarWinds to penetrate US government networks. The UK revealed on Thursday that a"low single digit" number of UK public organisations were also impacted by the breach.