Back to Cold War!

Nuclear-capable Russian bombers in European airspace, Nato intercepts, a foreign submarine in Swedish waters -- the fall-out from the Ukraine crisis feels like a return to Cold War days.

Nato has intercepted Russian aircraft on more than 100 occasions so far this year, three times more than all 2013, its new head Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday.

The US-led military alliance has deployed more aircraft, ships and personnel, aiming especially to reassure newer members such as the Baltic states and Poland, once ruled from Moscow, who have been unnerved by Russia's intervention in Ukraine.

Viewed from Moscow, there is no cause for concern -- Russia is simply asserting its position after long years of decline and Nato and the West had better get used to it.

"Before, our aircraft did not fly. Now they do," said Igor Korotchenko, a member of the Russian defence ministry's advisory group.

"It is a game of brinkmanship ... trying to get your opponent to make concessions," said Pavel Felguenhauer, a military analyst based in Moscow.

In this case, Russia wants to get the West to reverse the tough economic sanctions imposed over the Ukraine crisis and which have caused real pain to an already struggling economy, Felguenhauer said.

To do that, it aims to "frighten the Europeans, to make them believe that Russia is ready to do anything to get what it wants," he added.

It all started in Germany, with the fall of Berlin wall. Swept along by the excitement as the Berlin Wall was torn down, former top Soviet officials now say, 25 years on, they feel stabbed in the back by the West.

The Wall's collapse ushered in the end of communist East Germany and the country's reunification the following October. But the other events that followed -- the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the expansion of Nato to the east -- now cast a long shadow over the memory of those momentous times.

"The reunification of Germany was a logical step but it was done on the condition that the USSR would participate in the new European order and Nato would not move closer to our border," said a former diplomat Maximychev.

"Gorbachev set those conditions himself and the Western leaders assured him that was the case," he recalls. "Unfortunately he never signed any concrete deals about this."

Western leaders from the period have consistently rejected claims that they ever struck a deal with the Kremlin, and say no deal was ever broken.

Now looking back, for Maximychev it was "a period of grand illusions" when leaders in Moscow "took the West at its word."

In the intervening years, the US-led Nato alliance has incorporated 12 countries from the former Soviet bloc. More painful though is the current crisis over Ukraine.

The message from Moscow, said Sutyagin, UK-based political analyst, is clear: "Look you had better be a friend; if you don't, this is what you will have."