From a Wall Street Journal column by Ben Zimmer headlined “‘Brinkmanship’: Pushing Danger to Its Farthest Edge”:

The Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border is best understood, in the opinion of many foreign-policy pundits, as a return to Cold War “brinkmanship.”

Andrew Wilson, a Russian affairs analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Washington Post earlier this month that Vladimir Putin’s aggressive stance is “the standard not just Russian but Soviet method: brinkmanship, demand the maximum, don’t concede, extract concessions from the other side.”