Quite frankly the US and Western Europe don't have much they can do to counter what Russia has done in the Ukraine. The fact on the ground about the Crimea being largely Russian and that the Parliament there will vote to join the Russian Federation is nothing the West can do militarily about.

There are a couple of contradictions here in the International law/behavior space. Firstly Russia is a member of the UN Security Council and it has a treaty with the US, Britain, Italy and the Ukraine to protect the territorial integrity of the Ukraine after the Ukraine gave up the world's 3rd largest nuclear arsenal. It clearly is wrong because of those two facts. The other consideration is the overthrow of Yanukovich. After the protests last month, members of the opposition signed off on keeping things in place and have an election in May. This protest BTW was triggered by Yanukovich declining to join the European Community because of pressure from Putin. So internally the current Parliamentary-sanctioned government is not altogether kosher, but it's not Russia's business to intervene. All it did was to raise the specter of its Russian people being marginalized and the Russian language stripped from business.

Oh, and the US. Because it tries to get the international community behind its foreign military intervention, it can do something about Russia. But guess what, it failed to get the international community to back it on Iraq. so that ties the US's hands. See how Iraq still shadows our actions.

The only thing the US can do is to encourage the rest of the world to ISOLATE Russia. Sanctions, visa denials, frozen assets, etc. Given how interconnected all economies are this is the equivalent of military war. The only rub is that Germany (30% of its gas comes from Russia) and France won't go along. Isolating Russia means also that you give up on all the cooperation on nuclear weapons inspections and destruction that the US has with it. Also it means giving up Russia's help on Iran and Syria.

This is not a nice place to be. The reality is that Russia will just take Crimea and leave Eastern Ukraine alone. If it advances in eastern Ukraine then we have to act militarily by invoking the territorial integrity treaty. After taking Crimea, this will die down and it will be like those two provinces of Georgia that Russia took and Bush couldn't do anything about. The Russian market will suffer some and so too will foreign investment. But in the end money and capital won't care and the Russian oligarchs will exist until another Russian revolution - Kremlin Spring, anyone? See how oligarchs even in places like Guyana have built-in advantages?

Agreed - Crimea will become Russia, come what may.