Ukraine has ordered a full military mobilisation in response to Russia's build-up of its forces in Crimea.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Ukraine was "on the brink of disaster".
In Crimea, Ukrainian soldiers faced off with Russian soldiers surrounding their bases while the Russian army is said to be digging trenches on the border with mainland Ukraine.

A Georgia-Repeat!
The little Stalin in the Kremlin needs Bufferstates!
The Guy is as paranoid as Joe Stalin was!

A Georgia-Repeat!
The little Stalin in the Kremlin needs Bufferstates!
The Guy is as paranoid as Joe Stalin was!

In passing, I would like to address one of the hoariest canards of the Ukraine crisis: that Russian would recapitulate its actions of 2008, when it invaded Georgia. This assertion has been made by Reuters, AP, and I think quite a few others.

The facts-internationally recognized facts, I should say-was that Georgia used the occasion of the Beijing Olympics to launch a carefully planned invasion to recapture the breakaway province of South Ossetia-which was at the time autonomous under a truce agreement negotiated by Russia, Georgia, and the Ossetians in Sochi in 1993. The Georgians massed 12,000+ troops against 1000 Russian peacekeepers and a few hundred Ossetian militia. Georgia had apparently not anticipated a Russian intervention, and its forces were completely routed when the Russians indeed counterattacked.

Hopefully, the Georgia parallel will stand up in one regard: that the Russians promptly withdrew from Georgian territory after their objectives were met. And they did not annex South Ossetia; they allowed it to declare independence instead.

Naturally, the Obama team is hopping mad. Their plan failed, they have egg on their face, and they want revenge. That's why they dispatched the dreary John Kerry to make the rounds on the Sunday talk shows, so he could wave his finger threateningly at Putin while boring people to death with his monotone bloviating. The whole Obama team is having a giant hissyfit because they rolled the dice and came up snakeyes. That's unfortunate, but what do they plan to do about it; that's the question? After all, holding your breath and stomping your feet may be personally gratifying, but it doesn't translate into effective foreign policy. That takes insight, vision and a solid grasp of the facts, all of which are sadly lacking among the dismal members of the present administration. The problem is, there are no good options. Aside from launching a full-blown ground war, which nobody wants, Obama is just going to have to suck it up and move on, because, at the end of the day, Moscow's still going to control the Crimea and Obama and his EU collaborators are still going to be stuck with a broken, underwater province run by technocrats, kleptocrats, and neo-Nazi, clownshoes politicos. So, deal with it.

Here’s how the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, summed it up in an interview on CNN earlier in the week. He said, "This is not Syria, where the United States did have real options, and the president chose not to implement them. Here we really don’t have very good options to introduce."

Indeed. There are "no good options" which is why we think that Moscow will shrug off the mudslinging and the saber rattling and go about its business much like before. In the words of an old Russian proverb, "Dogs bark, but the caravan passes on."