What turns a man neutral? A lust for power, greed, or is he just born with a heart full of neutrality?

How nice of them

So, not my area of expertise, so take this with a grain of salt, I doubt that Russian surface vessels are going to do much in a war with the US, or to last very long. Dispersing them from their port would potentially be a good idea, to help make them harder to hit at one go, but I don’t think that it buys Russia much to move surface vessels near American coastlines.

It might be advantageous to move Russian ballistic-missile submarines close to US shores if Russia wanted to do a first strike, albeit not a game-changer. SLBMs can, in theory, be used to do depressed-trajectory shots, where instead of flying above the atmosphere, they push through the dense atmosphere and can achieve pretty short flight times on near-to-coast targets.

https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs03gronlund.pdf

SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have short flight times, comparable to escape times of bombers and launch times of ICBMs, thus raising the possibility of short time-of-flight (STOF) nuclear attacks

We find that current US and CIS SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have the capability to attack bomber bases at ranges of up to about 2,000 kilometers, and possibly at ranges up to 3,000 kilometers

But the real problem for Russia isn’t a disarming strike on American ICBM silos and air bases, but rather countering the American SLBMs at sea. To do a first strike on the US, Russia would need to either (a) have some sort of way of taking out US ballistic missile subs prior to them launching a counterstrike, which probably means needing to be able to locate them, or (b) be willing to absorb their response. And it’s a pretty good bet that Russia isn’t willing to do (b) in anything other than in pretty extreme scenarios.

Setting aside the military issues, legally, Russia putting ships there is a non-issue; Russia can sail warships around in the American EEZ (up to 200 nmi offshore) all they want, just not the territorial sea (12 nmi offshore).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters