Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[carl]

And that's the point. The morality of it is irrelevant. As you said, "results matter". And the result thus far has been continued Russian success, Ukrainian instability, and Western posturing. I don't think Moscow wants escalation any more than Washington does, insofar that escalation increases the chances of a decision point between credibility and costly intervention. The low-level agitation works in Moscow's favor and it'll be interesting to see how it shapes the elections - assuming they're going to be held. What we should be doing is attempting to mitigate any further losses rather than reversing Russia's gains.

You say "...we should be doing...". That is the key and effectively we are doing nothing right now. Mitigate, reversing, prevent, defending-we can figure that out but none of it can be done unless we get to doing.