Relations between Russia and the West are the “worst that we’ve seen since the Cold War, potentially worse than some periods of the Cold War,” Alina Polyakova, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said.

Polyakova said that during the Cold War years, there were avenues of dialogue between the Soviet Union and the U.S., including military-to-military relations and “a certain set of rules that both sides knew to follow.”

“Now those kinds of rules aren’t so clear anymore. We don’t have the same kind of institutional structure for a bipolar world,” she said. “And for those reason, it’s difficult to see where this downward spiral ends.”