“But,” Kerry added, Ukraine’s relations with Russia “should not be at the expense of having a relation with the rest of the world.” This is where the task turns delicate: How to open Ukraine to the rest of the world—a process that was underway until Yanukovych yanked it to a halt—while persuading Putin that the trend poses no threat to Russian interests?

The answer—maybe the only answer, the only way out of this crisis—lies in the upcoming elections. Let the Ukrainian people decide which way they want to go. Russia-leaning candidates will run, maybe one of them will even win. Certainly there’s no guarantee that the winner—or a majority of the Ukrainian people—will want to embrace the West exclusively.

A case can be made that Putin committed a huge strategic blunder in this crisis. Had he simply stood by and waited for the elections—had he used Ukrainian proxies to clamp down on the more militant protesters rather than send black-masked storm troopers to occupy the Crimean peninsula (which is under de facto Russian control and populated largely by Russian loyalists)—he probably would have won in the end. The Western nations, assured of the allegiances to democratic forms, would have backed away. Ukraine would still need Russian aid and trade to survive. Even with some movement by Ukraine toward the EU, Moscow would retain its dominance.