I don't know... I tried it in high school when I was bullied and it was not very effective. Though the one time I punched back one of them (quite ineffectively I must say, as I was way weaker then my counterpart) he indeed stopped bullying and we actually became almost friends in the end.

I know, it's an anecdote (one single instance in one single life) and you cannot translate easily high school dynamics with geopolitical ones, but sometimes it's possible to draw parallelism...

And from the voice of Lenin himself (used in a different context by him, but it works very well in this case for modern Russia): "You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw". If you find yourself at the other end of a bayonet, you better be wearing steel than going naked.