“We need to (respond). Not only the authorities, the state, but all our people in general. After all, they - the U.S. and its crappy allies - have declared a war on us without rules!,” Medvedev wrote on his official Telegram channel, which has over 1.3 million followers.
“Every day we should try to do maximum harm to those countries that have imposed these restrictions. Harm their economies, their institutions and their rulers. Harm the well-being of their citizens, their confidence in the future.”
I don’t think that escalation with the West is likely gonna be advantageous for Russia, but I suppose that, in the grand tradition of empiricism, there’s only one way to find out for sure.