Subtlety has never been Russia’s strong suit. You can dress a bear in a tutu but it doesn’t make her a ballerina.
Yes, they did behave bluntly, but it worked.
Americans have some bad habits this way, for example treating vicious barbarians as something other than what they are. Thinking that we can negotiate with terrorists, and foolish ideas like that.
But at the same time, Russians often have complementary tactics that should not be underestimated.
For example, you are aware of America’s so far ineffective approach to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But the Russians had a possibly better idea.
They said if Iran was nuclear *power*, that is fine. Power is good. But the waste product of power generation includes some plutonium. We don’t want them to have plutonium. So the Russians offered the Iranians a deal. Russia would provide all the nuclear fuel the Iranians needed for power generation, but on condition that Russia would get their plutonium containing nuclear waste.
It was a good tactic, even if the Iranians refused the deal.
It would have prevented Iran from developing its own enrichment capability, and kept weapons grade uranium and plutonium away from them; so everyone would know they didn’t have nuclear weapons.
As such, it was probably a better tactic than what the US has done with economic sanctions. Had the US not stamped its feet and demanded Iranian obedience, they might have (likely not), accepted the Russian proposal.