This may have been true decades ago when a different polity existed there and conditions in general were quite different. I see no evidence that this is true today. Occasionally Russian politicians might rattle the saber, but that's mostly for domestic political reasons, like it is in every other nation on Earth including USA. Just as USA society is not a monolith, neither is Russia society. Russian military interests are specific to particular nations like Ukraine and Syria where they also have economic interests. The main thing they want from USA is something they have in common with a number or other nations: please stop the sanctions and related economic aggression.
I'm sure anyone here could come up with a variety of USA war media articles or presentations criticizing the conduct of the Russian state in one way or another. In every such article I've read, Russia is held to a standard that USA hasn't met since the start of the Philippine-American War at the latest, and in some cases since the Pilgrims landed. I'd like to think that such articles insult their readers' intelligence.
> If our democracy can't handle speech
Speech or propaganda? An unfortunately high number of our citizens are either too stupid or too uninformed to vote "correctly" (i.e., assess and analyze proposed candidates, laws, etc). I'm not trying to be elitist, just pessimistic about things.
This is all an "Experiment in Democracy", right? We're applying a system developed in the agrarian age that now is suffering from information overload, nationally coordinated disinformation campaigns, and the influx of unlimited money in political campaigns.
We need to rethink how to achieve the original goals without bad guys gaming the system.
Sorry, this is kind of rambling, but HN sucks fluid dialog.