With US officials continuing to talk up “Russian aggression,” the Pentagon has sent a pair of F-22 Raptors to Romania, in what is being described as a “show of force” to prove US capabilities to deploy such planes anywhere in NATO territory.

The F-22s have been seldom-used by the Pentagon, annd repeatedly grounded by technical problems. Despite this, the program has cost an estimated $66 billion, well more than Russia spends on its entire military in a given year.

It’s the latest in a series of deployments of US military assets to the Russian frontier, all claiming Russian “aggression” as a justification, despite a lack of Russia actually doing anything beyond deployments reacting to the US buildup.

The pilots denied the F-22s were deployed to “provoke anybody,” though one of the pilots also referenced Russian intercepts of US warplanes along their border as a cause for the deployment, saying they “just want to encourage them to do that in a safe way.”