“We were all so happy to see him,” she told Al Jazeera, reminiscing about the jubilant crowds in central Moscow celebrating the Cuban leader’s 1963 visit.

So, when Russia said on January 14 that it could “neither confirm nor exclude” the deployment of Russian missiles to Cuba and Venezuela, to many Russians, the news was not just a threat.

It was a reminder of the USSR’s military and political might, its confrontation with the United States and the collective West, and, of course, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

“There are parallels with the Caribbean Missile Crisis,” Ihor Romanenko, a retired lieutenant general and Ukraine’s former deputy chief of staff, told Al Jazeera.

This time, the threat aims at getting a pledge from US President Joe Biden to leave Ukraine – or even the entire former USSR except for the Baltic states – in Russia’s political orbit.

“If they don’t deploy the missiles, then there will be an agreement, [Russia] will have to get something, get Ukraine at a bargain price or all the former Soviet republics,” Romanenko said.

“Considering the costs involved if this ‘threat’ were to be carried out in a strategically relevant way, and the relatively small contribution this would make to Russia’s priorities in Ukraine, I believe this to be a bluff,” Kevork Oskanian, a lecturer at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, told Al Jazeera.

But Ukraine went through two revolutions in 2005 and 2014, both times rejecting Russia’s political supremacy and seeking a path to join the European Union and NATO.