UKRAINE CRISIS DEEPENS – AT 8:44 A.M. ET:  Ukraine is mobilizing.  Russia's Vladimir Putin, even after a 90-minute talk with Field Marshal Obama, seems to be ignoring all warnings from the West.  Many analysts are calling this the greatest foreign crisis of the Obama presidency, as it involves a world power.  From Reuters:

(Reuters) - Ukraine mobilized for war on Sunday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin declared he had the right to invade, creating the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

"This is not a threat: this is actually the declaration of war to my country," said Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, head of a pro-Western government that took power when Russian ally Viktor Yanukovich fled last week.

Putin obtained permission from his parliament on Saturday to use military force to protect Russian citizens in Ukraine, spurning Western pleas not intervene.

Russian forces have already bloodlessly seized Crimea - an isolated Black Sea peninsula where Moscow has a naval base. On Sunday they surrounded several small Ukrainian military outposts there and demanded the Ukrainian troops disarm. Some refused, although no shots were fired.

And...

"If President Putin wants to be the president who started the war between two neighboring and friendly countries, between Ukraine and Russia, so: he has reached this target within a few inches. We are on the brink of disaster," Yatseniuk said in televised remarks in English, appealing for Western support.

COMMENT:  This is the culmination of Obama showing a weak hand to the world.  True, there is little or nothing that we can do militarily, and no one wants to start a major war over Ukraine.  However, there are diplomatic and economic steps that can be taken.  Canada, under the great Steve Harper – a more American leader than Obama will ever be – has already withdrawn its ambassador from Moscow and withdrawn from the G8 economic conference scheduled for June in Russia.

Obama and Kerry have simply talked.  And Obama's record of weakness is discouraging to anyone fighting for freedom and independence. 

Early in the Reagan administration, when the Polish solidarity movement erupted, Reagan could do little militarily to help it.  But there was a spiritual bond, and Reagan, unlike Obama, was strengthening the American military, not weakening it.  Reagan, unlike Obama, called things the way they were.  His description of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" is known to have inspired Soviet dissidents.  These spiritual steps, for want of a better term, do help.  Note please their absence today.  Why should Putin have anything to fear from Obama, whose own secretary of defense earlier this week announced a major reduction in American military strength?

March 2,  2014