Ukraine's conflict with Russia moves from a political to a military phase

The Washington Post says that

One Ukrainian soldier was killed and an officer wounded in an incident at a base near Simferopol, the Crimean regional capital. In a statement, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said the assailants “were wearing military uniforms of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” The ministry said it had now authorized its soldiers in Crimea to respond with live fire in self-defense.

Citing the storming of the base in Crimea, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that the conflict with Russia had moved from a “political to a military phase.”

Invoking the suffering of the Russian people and a narrative of constant betrayals by the West, President Vladimir Putin declared Tuesday that Russia was within its rights to reclaim Crimea, then signed a treaty that did just that.

Putin, defiant in the face of U.S. and European pressure, dispensed with legal deliberation and announced a swift annexation of Crimea, as if to put Europe’s most serious crisis in decades beyond the point where the results could be turned back.

In a speech to a joint session of the Russian parliament, he compared the move to the independence declaration of Kosovo in 2008 and the reunification of Germany in 1990 — but, in reality, this is the first time that one European nation has seized territory from another since the end of World War II.