After all, they've been supplying Iranian backed proxy armies with intel, Xi likes bad guys.
Don't expect the Russian people as a whole to wake up any time soon, their alarm clocks have been turned off and the KGB controls everything they see and hear and enforces groupthink with violence. Right now, they're hunkered down, just trying to survive the next few years However, there is a Russian intternal resistance movement and it's getting more organized, torching factories and disrupting rail lines.
Considering what Russia has been doing to Ukraine and how Putin is now playing a game of chicken with NATO while telling the Russian people we're already at war, I don't think we need to continue to worry much about improved intelligence or longer range missiles being particularly escalatory. If we wind up in WWIII, it will be because Russia demanded it in an attempt to fulfill its destiny as owner of all of Europe. And yes, that is what is driving Putin, he said so the night before the invasion in 2022.