Vladimir Putin's Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean peninsula by force on the weekend and now has his sights on the rest of his Slavic neighbor. The brazen aggression brings the threat of war to the heart of Europe for the first time since the end of the Cold War. The question now is what President Obama and free Europe are going to do about it.

With a swiftness and organization that suggests the plans were hatched weeks ago, Mr. Putin is moving to carve up Ukraine after Russia's satrap in Kiev, former President Viktor Yanukovych, was deposed in a popular democratic uprising. Russian troops have invaded Ukraine's territory and now control all border crossings, ports and airports in Crimea. The Kremlin's rubber-stamp parliament on Saturday approved Russian military intervention anywhere in Ukraine, which is nothing less than a declaration of war. The new government in Kiev responded by putting forces on high alert.

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This is a crisis made entirely in Moscow. Speaking the day Mr. Yanukovych fled his palace in Kiev, Mr. Putin lied to President Obama about Russia's actions and intentions. So did his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in calls with Secretary of State John Kerry. If the blitzkrieg succeeds, Russia's assault could end Ukraine's 22-year history as a unitary independent state. The peaceful European order that the U.S. has paid such a high price to establish after the collapse of the Soviet Union is also in danger.

Entering his 15th year in power, Mr. Putin has never concealed his ambition to recreate Russia's regional hegemony. He has replaced Soviet Marxism with ultra-nationalism, contempt for the West and a form of crony state capitalism. He bit off chunks of Georgia in 2008 and paid no price, but Ukraine's 46 million people and territory on the border of NATO are a bigger prize. His updated Brezhnev Doctrine seeks to entrench authoritarianism in client states and prevent them from joining free Europe.

We have been rubbing Russia up the wrong way for nearly 25 years.

It is hard to see why.

Moscow could have been our friend if we had wanted that.

We rightly viewed the old Soviet Union as a global menace to freedom.

But Russia is no such thing, just a major regional power sick of being humiliated and pushed around by ignorant outsiders.

I watched the old Soviet menace vanish on the streets of Moscow in August 1991 when a KGB putsch failed, the Communist Party was shattered in pieces, and the USSR collapsed in a cloud of rust.

Russians always believed there was an unspoken agreement that, in return for this, they would be allowed their dignity. They now believe that agreement has been broken.

Russia's state-controlled network Channel One has cancelled its live coverage of the Oscars in order to cover the crisis in Ukraine.

The channel was due to show the awards between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m. Moscow time on Monday, AFP reported Sunday.

In a statement, Channel One said: "Due to the large amount of news concerning the situation in Crimea and Ukraine, and the audience's rising interest in news programs, Channel One considers it impossible to air the Oscars ceremony for five hours, particularly in the morning."

It added that the awards would be aired at midnight on Monday instead.

Yury Gladilshchikov, a film critic for Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper, who had been invited to be a commentator for the Oscar ceremony, said he was told late Sunday that live coverage had been cancelled.

"They are gathering politicians for the morning programming," Gladilshchikov said on Facebook.

"The First Amendment was intended to secure something more than an exercise in futility." - Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in Minnesota Board for Community Colleges v. Knight (1984)

Living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign. That's what the First Amendment is supposed to be about.

Unfortunately, as I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

In fact, if the court rulings handed down in the last week of February 2014 are anything to go by, the First Amendment has, for all intents and purposes, become an exercise in futility.

On February 26, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 9-0 ruling, held that anti-nuclear activist John Denis Apel could be prosecuted for staging a protest on a public road at an Air Force base, free speech claims notwithstanding, because the public road is technically government property.

Insisting that it's not safe to display an American flag in an American public school, on February 27, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that school officials were justified when they ordered three students at a California public high school to cover up their patriotic apparel emblazoned with American flags or be sent home on the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo, allegedly out of a concern that it might offend Hispanic students.

Phoning Russian president said to be 'most painful way to spend 90 minutes' for Obama - ahead of dentistry without anaesthetic

New details have begun to emerge of the extraordinary 90-minute phone call between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin on Saturday night, during which the US president warned his Russian counterpart that Moscow could face "serious repercussions" unless it halted military operations in Ukraine.

The call, made at Obama's initiation and carried out from the telephone at his desk in the Oval Office, was described by one US government official as "candid and direct".

The president, who was wearing a weekend uniform of a grey shirt, dark blue jeans and brown suede shoes, "told Mr Putin that it was imperative to find a different path, to roll back this invasion and undo this act of invasion," secretary of state John Kerry said on Sunday.

A former diplomatic official said a Russia expert at the State Department's office of language services would probably have been patched into the call remotely, to translate each of Putin's statements to Obama after they were made. Simultaneous translation is often avoided during high-stakes calls due to the need for precision with language - explaining the extraordinary length of the conversation, thought to be by far the longest between the two men.

Russia has said China is largely "in agreement" over Ukraine, after other world powers condemned Moscow for sending troops into the country.

Hundreds of Russian soldiers have surrounded a military base in Crimea, preventing Ukrainian soldiers from going in or out.

The convoy blockading the site, near the Crimean capital Simferopol, includes at least 17 military vehicles.

Russian troops are also reported to have taken control of a ferry terminal in the city of Kerch on the eastern tip of Crimea, which has a majority Russian-speaking population.

Ukraine's defence ministry said two Russian fighter jets violated the country's air space in the Black Sea on Sunday night and that it had scrambled an interceptor aircraft to prevent the "provocative actions".

And reports claimed pro-Russian protesters had occupied a floor of the regional government building in Donetsk. The 11-storey building has been flying the Russian flag for the last three days.

The United States is pressuring Israel to stop assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, admitting that Mossad agents were behind the string of terrorist attacks, a new report says.

In a rare confession that Mossad agents were behind the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, the report written by Dan Raviv and published by the CBS News said that Washington officials have communicated to Israeli intelligence agencies to stop the targeting of scientists, saying it may derail nuclear talks between Tehran and world powers.

In his report Dan Raviv, a journalist who co-wrote a book about Israel's Mossad secret operations, also said that apart from Washington's pressure, Israel's intelligence agencies have also concluded that the operations had become too dangerous for them as they do not want their experienced forces to be "captured and hanged."

In their 2012 book, entitled Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars, Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman said that Israeli spies have killed at least four Iranian nuclear scientists.

I don't know who the Western spinmeisters think they are fooling. Since the official end of the Cold War and defense spending was scaled back, it did not take the warmongers long to create a new plan to replace the old Cold War and keep those defense contracts flowing.

In what turned out to be a cruel twist of fate, Mao's Long March, and the old Soviet Union's claim to world proletariat domination have been replaced by NATO's march to Russia's western borders, and America's Asia Pivot to threaten China's energy supply lines. It looks like the old Cold War protagonists have switched sides.

Where credible offensive threats were not to be found, phony ones were conjured up to pick the pockets of Western citizens for new high tech and white elephant weapons programs to feed the greedy arms industry merchants.

The same amount of expenditure put into peacetime infrastructure could have gone a long way to preventing the horrible state of the world's financial condition. There we find the West once again at the head of the pack of looters and raiders, making war on friend and foe alike as an equal opportunity employer.

Media reports about an alleged Russian ultimatum made to the Ukrainian armed forces in Crimea are "total nonsense," a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry said.

He said that no ultimatum had been made to the Ukrainian forces, Interfax reports.

"We have become accustomed to the daily accusations by the Ukrainian media of carrying out some sort of military actions against our Ukrainian colleagues," Russian Black Sea Fleet representative said, adding that "those who want to pit us against each other in the Crimea won't succeed."

"There's nothing new about such disinformation. It's clear who is behind this. Those 'puppeteers' have been unable to come up with anything new since Yugoslavia, Iraq and Syria," he added.

Also, a source in the Russian Defense Ministry told RT that they are unaware of any Russian ultimatum toward the Ukrainian forces in Crimea.

The source revealed that they had only heard about the alleged ultimatum from a report by Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

"We're interested in keeping friendly relations with the people of Ukraine and in preserving stability," the source told RT.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House tomorrow, President Barack Obama will tell him that his country could face a bleak future -- one of international isolation and demographic disaster -- if he refuses to endorse a U.S.-drafted framework agreement for peace with the Palestinians. Obama will warn Netanyahu that time is running out for Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy. And the president will make the case that Netanyahu, alone among Israelis, has the strength and political credibility to lead his people away from the precipice.

In an hourlong interview Thursday in the Oval Office, Obama, borrowing from the Jewish sage Rabbi Hillel, told me that his message to Netanyahu will be this: "If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?" He then took a sharper tone, saying that if Netanyahu "does not believe that a peace deal with the Palestinians is the right thing to do for Israel, then he needs to articulate an alternative approach." He added, "It's hard to come up with one that's plausible."

Unlike Netanyahu, Obama will not address the annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group, this week -- the administration is upset with Aipac for, in its view, trying to subvert American-led nuclear negotiations with Iran. In our interview, the president, while broadly supportive of Israel and a close U.S.-Israel relationship, made statements that would be met at an Aipac convention with cold silence.