Since the cold war ended it's now obvious that we both a)vastly overestimated Russia's capacity and b)pressured them into a lot of military spending simply because they felt they had to do so because of how much we were spending and all our sabre-rattling.
The only people who "won" were the very military-industrial complex Ike warned us about.
If it is about the cold war, that would have been the USSR, not Russia. And they did act against the West (WWII disagreements aside, starting with the blockade of West Berlin), they planned for attacks on Western Europe, etc. The idea that the USSR and Warsaw pact were somehow just reactive isn't true.
Might the West have overestimated their capacity: probably yes (especially in later years), but the conflict was still very real.
> b)pressured them into a lot of military spending simply because they felt they had to do so because of how much we were spending and all our sabre-rattling.
Yes, that was the Soviet (Russian) perspective. They felt pressured to keep up with the US. But the flipside is that the inverse was also happening; America spent tons of money developing new weapons and capabilities because the Russians were doing the same. For instance, the F-15 was developed into the air superiority fighter that it is because the Mig-25 was (mistakenly) believed to be similarly capable.
Too often the "Soviets were afraid of America" narrative is used to suggest that America was an aggressor and the Soviets were hapless victims of this aggression, forced to spend by America. But the truth is that both sides were doing this to each other, and besides, the whole of it was arguably started by aggressive Soviet expansion before and after WW2, for instance the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in which the Soviet Union conspired with the Nazis to divide up Poland, Russia's subsequent refusal to allow Poland to become independent after the war, and the persistent Soviet threats to invade western Europe and incorporate France, the UK, etc into their "union". The "Soviet Union" was a farce of a union, a fig leaf over Russian imperialism.
Also, USSR support for North Korea and North Vietnam surely hurt a lot of Americans (and others) for real during those two wars.