PUTIN'S LATEST MOVES INTO UKRAINE

Andrew Stuttaford at the National Review writes about the "Guns of August" which is a term used regarding the start of battles in World War I.  He quotes from an article by Anne Applebaum in Slate which discusses the new maps circulating in Russia showing the borders of Catherine the Great.

…In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkov and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova. Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state—Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here—Novorossiya can grow larger over time….

Applebaum is predicting that Putin will test NATO in the foreseeable future.  Stuttaford discusses other the comments of several other writers critical of Obama and the West's response and indicating a growing fear in Eastern Europe about Russian aggression against them.