Frum: In Ukraine, U.S. green light to Putin?

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  Frum: In Ukraine, U.S. green light to Putin?
  
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  (CNN) - When Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, Western leaders warned Russia against trying the same trick in mainland Ukraine. Russia is now trying the same trick in mainland Ukraine.

• Over the past several days, masked, heavily armed men have seized strategic locations in eastern Ukraine.

  In Kharkiv, pro-Russian armed forces have occupied City Hall. In Donetsk, they have taken control of the regional legislature building and the interior ministry. In Luhansk, they have taken the compound of the state security agency. In the city of Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region, armed men shot their way into police headquarters.

  Cell phone towers are being toppled through the area, according to Ukraine's acting interior minister, apparently with a view to silencing nonmilitary communications.

  Uniformed men have established checkpoints around the city of Sloviansk, also near Donetsk. A gunfight erupted at one checkpoint on Sunday, apparently leaving two dead.

  The Russians have infiltrated special forces into Ukraine over the past weeks and months. Now they are busily creating conditions of "instability" that could provide a pretext for outright Russian intervention, followed most likely by a partition of Ukraine and alignment of the eastern provinces toward Russia. In Crimea, Russian intervention has been followed by a campaign of "disappearances" of opposition and potential opposition figures. Inside Russia too, policy is turning again sharply repressive, symbolized by the spread of hammer-and-sickle flags at pro-Putin demonstrations.

  Europe outside the Balkans has known profound peace since 1991. Even the murderous wars in the former Yugoslavia, atrocious as they were, never threatened the general European peace. The Russians' actions in Ukraine do threaten the general peace. Russia is using military force -- as opposed to its usual tool kit of corruption, intimidation, and no-return-address assassination -- to reclaim former Soviet-occupied territory. In Ukraine, Russia has launched a war of reconquest. It's very hard to predict where that war will stop.

  President Obama was very wrong in his speech in Brussels on March 26 to suggest that the United States had no national interest in Ukraine. What's at stake in Ukraine is the peace and stability of the European continent, an issue over which the United States fought two world wars. Yet the president has signaled to Russia that it need not fear any very robust U.S. or NATO response to its depredations in Ukraine.

  Opinion: The West must not blame itself for Putin's revanchism

  More from the March 26 speech: "Of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO -- in part because of its close and complex history with Russia. Nor will Russia be dislodged from Crimea or deterred from further escalation by military force."