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Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama hold a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, on June 18, 2012.CAROLYN KASTER/The Associated Press

It was the first question U.S. President Barack Obama was asked at a press conference on Tuesday as he announced new sanctions targeting the defence, finance and energy industries of the Russian Federation.

"Is this a new Cold War, sir?"

Mr. Obama replied that it was not. The United States and Russia, he said, were divided only over "a very specific issue related to Russia's unwillingness to recognize that Ukraine can chart its own path."

If only that were so. The unfortunate truth is that the West and Russia are very much back on Cold War footing, and have been for some time. (Full disclosure: I wrote a book about U.S.-Russia relations entitled, well, The New Cold War, back in 2007.)

The current standoff is not about one specific issue, or even just Ukraine. The White House and the Kremlin are now at odds over Moscow's aiding of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine (and the West's support for a government in Kiev that the Kremlin says has "fascist" links); Russia's backing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (and the West's backing of rebels that the Kremlin say have jihadi links); and Iran's nuclear program – to name just the main and most dangerous areas of conflict.

You know you're in a cold war when:

1. You're fighting proxy wars

There's no question that Russia has given weapons, men and diplomatic support to the Donetsk People's Republic, the eastern Ukrainian separatists who have declared independence from Kiev and who recently gained the attention of the world when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 came crashing down on rebel-held territory, apparently hit by a Soviet-era surface-to-air missile. And while the Kremlin backs the rebels, the West has been speeding economic and non-lethal military aid to President Petro Poroshenko's government.

If you include the 298 people who died on board MH17, more than 1,400 people have been killed since fighting began in April.

The roles are reversed in Syria, where the United States (and its allies in the Muslim world) ship weapons to the rebel side, specifically the Free Syrian Army, hoping to bolster the remaining "moderates" among the anti-al-Assad forces. Meanwhile, Moscow continues to sell arms to the al-Assad regime. In a bloody flashback to the worst Cold War proxy conflicts in places like Angola and Mozambique, U.S.-trained and armed rebels are being attacked from the air by Hind helicopters supplied to the Syrian government by Moscow. Mr. Obama just asked Congress for an additional $500-million (U.S.) to fund the rebels. Current Russian military contracts with Damascus are believed to be worth $1.5-billion. Three years into this conflict, 250,000 people are dead and three million others have been forced to flee their homes.

2. You're waging economic warfare

Make no mistake, the expanding list of Western sanctions against Russia are designed to bring down Vladimir Putin. By specifically targeting members of his inner circle with asset freezes and travel bans, Washington, Brussels and Ottawa are hoping to turn those oligarchs and bureaucrats against their master, resulting in a palace coup. The early returns aren't promising. The mood in Moscow is one of a siege mentality, with most Russians rallying behind Mr. Putin, who has seen his approval rating spike from to 83 per cent in recent weeks – following the annexation of Crimea, the start of the civil war in Donetsk and the first few rounds of Western sanctions – from a valley of 54 per cent a year ago.

(There are reports that some Russian billionaires are angry that Mr. Putin is putting their fortunes at risk by courting sanctions, but history has shown that it doesn't end well for oligarchs who challenge Mr. Putin. See Berezovsky, Boris and Khodorkovsky, Mikhail.)

Mr. Putin, whom opponents accuse of wanting to rebuild the USSR, seems ready to batten down the hatches. The sanctions might be a positive, just as the old Iron Curtain forced the Communist Bloc to be self-reliant. "We can definitely produce everything we need ourselves. There is no question about that," Mr. Putin told a meeting of defence officials this week. "We now have the chance and obligation to build up a modern, hi-tech production base."

3. There's an ideological divide

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was supposed to mark the "end of history." The communism-or-capitalism question had been answered, and everyone seemed to agree that liberal democracy and free markets were the only way forward. Except that Russia was plunged into chaos following the collapse of the USSR, and "democracy" and "free markets" became associated in the minds of many Russians with the chaos and kleptocracy of the Boris Yeltsin era. Enter Vladimir Putin in 1999, promising to restore order while quietly rolling back the freedoms Russians gained in 1991.

Fifteen years later, Russia and China can claim to be the co-inventors of a new system of authoritarian capitalism, where the state allows the individual limited freedoms, while the levers of true economic and political power remain in the hands of the Kremlin and the Communist Party of China.

Though Moscow and Beijing are at this point still wary of a full alliance (though they are both members of a loose military grouping called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization), they share a disdain of Western hegemony and a distrust of popular movements like the Arab Spring and last winter's uprising in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin and China's President Xi Jinping see all street protests – and even social media campaigns – as necessarily having been cooked up in Washington. This shared paranoia is slowly bringing them closer together.

4. There are dissidents and political refugees on both sides

As Mr. Putin has tightened his control on Russia's political scene, high-profile dissidents like Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky have left the country and moved to the West to avoid persecution back home (the latter after spending a decade in jail). Meanwhile, Edward Snowden, the analyst who exposed the scale of the U.S. National Security Agency's surveillance activities, is applying to spend another year in Moscow.

5. You're playing zero-sum game politics

In Vladimir Putin's world, the West is his enemy, and has been since 2003, when he believes his "friend" George W. Bush ignored him over the Iraq war and then backed the pro-Western Rose Revolution in the former Soviet state of Georgia.

Since then, Mr. Putin has been guided by the principle that anything that irritates the West is likely to be good for Russia. Witness his 2006 decision to invite Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal to the Kremlin. Mr. Putin, who flattened Chechnya in a no-holds-barred war to oust Islamist radicals from southern Russia, has no time for the kind of politics Hamas preaches. But if Washington was trying to isolate the newly elected Hamas government in the Palestinian Territories, that automatically made Mr. Meshaal someone Mr. Putin was interested in doing business with.

The same logic inspired the Kremlin's interventions to keep former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych from signing an association agreement with the European Union. Moscow's short-term win – Mr. Yanukovych was lured away from the EU pact by a promise of $15-billion in Russian aid – sparked the street protests in Kiev that brought down Mr. Yanukovych's government.

6. You're in a propaganda war

Western leaders now regularly compare Mr. Putin to Hitler, and tabloid newspapers in Britain and elsewhere effectively convicted the Russian leader of mass murder over the downing of MH17 before the first investigator of any stripe had even reached the crash site.

Meanwhile, in Russia, a Gallup poll this week found that approval of Mr. Obama had fallen to 4 per cent. European leaders fared only slightly better, with just 6 per cent of Russians thinking favourably of them. Those watching Kremlin-controlled television live in a different world than consumers of Western media: A poll released Wednesday found that 82 per cent of Russians believe it was the Ukrainian military, not the rebels of the Donetsk People's Republic, that shot down MH17.

Does that figure – 82 per cent – look familiar? It's almost identical to Mr. Putin's support level. It also happens to be roughly the share of Russians who say they get most of their news from state TV.

7. It's not ending soon

The public support means Mr. Putin won't back down in Ukraine. Arguably, it means he couldn't even if he wanted to. The Kremlin remains as dedicated to forcing Ukraine to accept a new constitution – one that reimagines the country along the lines of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with an officially neutral foreign policy that would preclude the country ever joining NATO – as the White House is committed to ousting al-Assad.

But this New Cold War is different than the last Cold War, right?

Definitely. The fact that one of the proxy wars is being fought right up against the Russian border tells you how far the ground has tilted against Moscow since 1991. It also make this fight much more existential for Mr. Putin and his coterie than the Cold War arguments over which economic system was superior.

Want a worst-case scenario? Here's what military analyst Alexander Golts wrote in The Moscow Times: "Russia is becoming a lonely pariah without alliances or military might, other than its nuclear weapons. And without any other easy means of achieving its objectives, I am afraid that the Kremlin will constantly try to prove it is just crazy enough to use its nuclear weapons. In short, Russia is turning into a second North Korea, only much, much larger, and far more dangerous."

There's got to be some good news, right?

Kind of. The United States, which has been without an ambassador to Moscow since Michael McFaul stepped down in February, should have a new envoy in place any day now after John Tefft won rapid approval from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week. "In my view we cannot afford to wait to send an ambassador to Russia," the committee's chairman, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez said.

Canada, which withdrew its ambassador to Russia, John Kur, for "consultations" on March 1, doesn't share Sen. Menendez's sense of urgency. There's been no suggestion that Mr. Kur will be back sent back to his post anytime soon.

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