WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 (UPI) -- The announcement Saturday by President Vladimir Putin that Russia has launched a vast program to improve the country's missile defense system is being presented as a response to American plans to deploy a similar new U.S. Anti-missile system in Eastern Europe.

But it comes in the context of other recent Russian steps that suggest a determined and coordinated effort by the Kremlin to assert a return to great-power status by restoring much of the military power of the old Soviet Union. To suspicious observers in the West and to U.S. military commanders who must make their own strategic assessments based on the capabilities of potential rivals, it must look as if the Russian bear is back.

In one crucial sense, the bear never went away. Although Russia’s navy has been rusting in dock for more than a decade, and though its army has shrunk in size and very nearly collapsed in morale after its setbacks in the Chechen wars, the nuclear-armed strategic rocket forces have retained much of their traditional power to awe and to deter. Russia remains the only country that could, in theory, destroy organized life in the United States.

But something new is happening. Russia is rattling its sabers again. Last week’s planting of a titanium flag on the seabed below the North Pole was one sign. Another was the resumption of long-haul missions into U.S. and NATO-controlled airspace by Russia’s strategic bombers. Two T-95MS ‘Bear’ turboprop bombers last week flew over the Pacific island of Guam, where the United States is upgrading its air and naval bases.

"It has always been the tradition of our long-range aviation to fly far into the ocean, to meet (U.S.) aircraft carriers and greet American pilots visually," Maj. Gen. Pavel Androsov told a Moscow news conference. But that tradition was in abeyance in the 1990s, when the Russian military was short of aviation fuel and training flights were cut drastically. Under Putin, all that has changed.