Nathalie Rothschild writes: Everywhere one looks on the eastern fringes of Europe, the Russian bear menaces. From Ukraine to Estonia, Russian troops are either engaged in outright warfare or testing the borders of Russia’s neighbors. In Sweden and Finland, Russian planes and vessels are prodding at coastal defenses. Nordic defense officials now speak of a fundamentally altered security environment in the Baltics.

There is a measure of the surreal to these developments and Sweden’s response to them. When in October Swedish forces hunted what was all but certainly a Russian submarine in the Stockholm archipelago, Swedish media dispatched reporters into dinghies, where they breathlessly tried to intuit news in the movement of naval vessels. And when Sverker Göranson, the supreme commander of Sweden’s armed forces, went before the media last month to present concrete evidence that a submarine had violated his country’s territorial waters, a Russian newspaper responded by calling the officer “unmanly.”  Swedish Women and Putin