Russia rattles its saber, even threatening satellites, but the U.S. is moving on to China.

(Originally published Oct. 28 in “What in the World“) Russian President Vladimir Putin said American efforts to arrest its inevitable decline from global dominance had put the world in the most dangerous decade since World War II.

In his annual remarks at the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin blamed the West for inciting his invasion of Ukraine and accused it of nuclear brinkmanship. He also quoted from a lecture in 1978 by Russian dissident and novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the West’s hollow materialism and “blindness of superiority.”

Putin also denied that Russia was planning to deploy a so-called “dirty bomb” in Ukraine. U.S. concerns that Russia will stage a “false flag” operation in Ukraine as justification for escalation have prompted a new State Dept. program to better track the U.S. weapons being imported to the country, especially portable weapons like anti-tank Javelin missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Officials also want to avoid these weapons being diverted onto the black market and shipped outside Ukraine.

Meanwhile, a senior Russian foreign ministry official told the United Nations that Russia could target commercial satellites if they are being used to aid Ukraine in the war against Russia. Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Nonproliferation and Arms Control, didn’t name any specific satellites, but the Pentagon has been using low-earth orbiting satellites on the Starlink network of SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, to help coordinate Ukraine’s defenses.

But in the declassified, public version of its four-yearly National Defense Strategy report, released Thursday, the Pentagon gauges China, not Russia, as America’s most “consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades.” Two weeks ago, the White House issued its own National Security Strategy, calling China “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”