From the New York Times: Normally the formality of European diplomacy would be shattered if, say, an ambassador suggested that his country might kick its opponents’ posterior.

But when the remark comes from Dmitri O. Rogozin, Russia’s bombastic ambassador to NATO, it tends to elicit at most a cringe.

Even so, when Mr. Rogozin took to his Twitter account this week and wrote that typically tart message in response to Washington’s planned deployment of missile interceptors in Romania, it did not help ease tensions. “The Americans and their allies again want to surround the den of the Russian bear?” he wrote in Russian. “How many times must they be reminded that this is dangerous?”

“The bear will emerge,” he wrote, and kick them in the you-know-what. (Mr. Rogozin softened his own translation into English on Twitter, using the slightly more diplomatic “beat up.”)

Mr. Rogozin has rarely been one for niceties in his two years as Russia’s envoy to NATO headquarters in Brussels, famously hanging a portrait of Stalin in his office when he arrived. But his bluster seems to have grown as he has threw himself into the anarchic twittersphere to broadcast his views.” (photo: PressTV)