Tomorrow's military parade in Red Square marking Russia's 1945 victory in the great patriotic war may carry more than a whiff of Soviet-era domineering. General Vladimir Bakin, the commander of Moscow region, says missiles, tanks and other symbols of Russian power, mostly absent from the celebrations since the collapse of communism, could go on display again.
No offence intended, of course - but the point is made. Such a show of might is wholly consistent with President Vladimir Putin's relentless, multi-faceted drive to re-establish Russia, in proud word and deed, as a global player whose interests are a key factor in every strategic equation.
Mr Putin's freeze on cooperation with Nato over conventional forces in Europe, and his vigorous opposition to US missile defence plans in Poland and the Czech Republic, are all one with an ostentatious, Brezhnev-style show of force in Red Square. So, too, is his ruthless clampdown on liberal opposition parties - indeed, on anybody who seriously challenges the "new oligarchs" of the Kremlin ahead of coming elections.
How Russia conducts itself is ultimately Russia's business, but the disruptive impact of its example and actions on neighbours in the former Soviet sphere is increasingly plain. As a British Moscow watcher put it, if Mr Putin were subject to the juvenile courts, an Asbo would have been slapped on him long ago.
In Serbia, without a government since inconclusive elections last January, ultra-nationalists are returning to the fore, emboldened by the strengthening anti-western rhetoric of Russian leaders and Moscow's sympathy for Serb hostility to Kosovo's independence.
Today's election as parliamentary speaker of Tomislav Nikolic of the far-right Serbian Radical party, with the turncoat support of outgoing prime minister Vojislav Kostunica's conservatives, was deplored by one pro-western opposition leader in Belgrade as "a step back to the darks days of [former president Slobodan] Milosevic's reign".
Mr Nikolic, now Serbia's second most powerful official, backs closer ties with Russia, not EU membership. He has also advocated military intervention to prevent Kosovan independence. The pledge at a weekend rally in Krusevac of a new paramilitary force - modelled on the notorious Serb militias of the Bosnian war - to "save Kosovo" is seen as another troubling regression.
Such developments have led some commentators to resurrect questions about US and British-backed efforts to force through supervised Kosovan statehood at the UN. In theory at least, partitioning Kosovo by leaving Serbia in control of ethnic Serb-dominated territories north of the Ibar river might be wiser, said Tihomir Loza of Transitions Online - even though that would not resolve the problems of Serb communities further south.
"As one couldn't hope to encourage the emergence of a peaceful, forward-looking Serbia by totally humiliating it, leaving it in possession of something in Kosovo would make a lot of sense," Mr Loza said. "The north will in reality be Serb in an independent Kosovo, as now, just as the rest of Kosovo was always going to be Albanian."
The further muddying of already murky pools by Mr Putin's ever more chippy, nationalistic Russia was also in evidence in its furiously overblown reaction to Estonia's decision to relocate a Soviet war memorial away from Tallinn city centre.
Ethnic Russian rioting and similarly ugly protests aimed at European diplomats in Moscow served a broader Kremlin agenda. The furore was all to do with old-style Soviet era intimidation of the Baltic republics, now sheltering under an EU and Nato shield. Supposed "blasphemous" treatment of war heroes was never the issue.
"The Serbian nationalists and Estonia's Russians have both been emboldened by the support of a strong external sponsor, namely Russia. Otherwise they probably wouldn't bother because they know they would lose," a leading regional expert said. "There is a link between rising Russian nationalism and rising Serbian nationalism. In Estonia, Moscow saw the memorial row as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the Baltic states and the rest of Europe and they took it."
Similar Russia pot-stirring continues with varying degrees of intensity in Georgia, where Estonia's visiting president sought moral support this week, among separatists in Moldova and in Ukraine - although analysts say the latest crisis in Kiev had more to do with internal power struggles than external meddling.
All of which adds up to a formidable agenda for Condoleezza Rice during her hastily arranged visit to Moscow next week. Resolving the missile defence row is said to top the US secretary of state's to-do list. But of all the instances of Russian antisocial behaviour and rising neighbourhood tensions, Kosovo and the drift towards violence in Serbia is the most imminently explosive.
Simon Tisdall