Soft power squelched

Despite the anti-homosexual laws brouhaha, it has to be said that the Sochi Winter Olympics were a success, a snowflake failing to grow into an Olympic ring notwithstanding.  Not that I can say that of course for I watched maybe something in the region of 1-2% of the whole event.  The exorbitant costs, the kickbacks to oligarchs, the maltreatment of migrant labour - three issues related to the construction of Sochi alone, let alone wider human right issues in Russia were studiously downplayed.  The general consensus though, epitomised by Sir Steve Redgrave, has coalesced around that it was a positive and Russian analysts trumpet Russia's projection of 'soft power'.  That's not to say it wasn't taken extremely seriously - no jokey blaring of The Beatles' Back in the USSR, especially with the line about "take me to the snow-capped mountains way down south," but all the same it was hailed as a glorious sporting triumph.
Even before Vladimir Putin's precious showpiece had concluded, attention was shifting to the Ukraine.  To 'lock in' soft power, there has to be a period of calm and stability where the honeymoon glow extends into a gradual changing in attitudes towards the progenitor - there has to be a critical mass prepared to exercise the benefit of the doubt.  But events in the Ukraine - a revolution without a hubristic colour - have humiliated Putin, who still cannot grasp the concept of 'soft power'.  Back in the USSR seems to have been his message to Ukrainians via the medium of the Eurasian Economic Union.  Therefore, there have been unscheduled military exercises in western Russia (but curiously nothing east of the Volga River), fighter jets put on high alert and the ratcheting up of rhetoric from the Kremlin towards Ukraine, though disclaiming that such aggressive statements have anything to do with the intense sabre-rattling threatening to burst out of the scabbard - it's all coincidence.  This is not to say that tanks will be rolling across the border and bombs dropped on Kiev - Ukraine is far more powerful and important than Georgia and it doesn't have de facto independent regions with whom to contend, an autonomous Crimea the extent of distance from metropolitan control.
With the fall of Viktor Yanukovych (reportedly seen in a sanatorium outside Moscow, he'll probably take Russian citizenship to avoid extradition and copper-bottom it by being 'elected' to the Duma), Putin is making his displeasure known, to the street opposition, the official (now former) opposition and the West.  His blinkered idea of power being solely 'hard' has been disastrous to Russia's image, however, all Sochi soft power scorched away like a blowtorch to those snowy slopes.