President Obama is dispatching Vice President Joe Biden to Kiev next week in a show of Western support against Russian intimidation, but the Veep may want to speed up his deployment. By then Vladimir Putin may already have annexed another chunk of Ukraine.

As our Matt Kaminski reports nearby from Kiev, the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine may already be underway. Masked and armed Russian speakers with the distinct look of special forces, but no military insignias, took over police stations and other locations in much of Ukraine's east over the weekend. This was the Russian president's stealth mode of invasion in Crimea. By the time the West figured out what was going on, the deed was done.

The difference this time is that Ukraine is responding with at least some force of its own. The Kiev government is mobilizing its military for what it called a "large-scale antiterrorist operation" in the east. "We won't allow Russia to repeat the Crimean scenario in the eastern regions of the country," said acting President Oleksandr Turchynov.

Gun battles in Slovyansk and elsewhere have already produced casualties, and the violence may be exactly what Mr. Putin wants as a pretext to send in larger forces in the name of protecting Russian-speaking minorities. This too was part of the Crimea playbook. So much for the diplomatic "off-ramp" that Mr. Obama keeps beseeching Mr. Putin to take. The only off-ramp the Russian wants is inside Ukraine and points west.

Mr. Kaminski also reports on how the Obama Administration rejected Kiev's pleas for military aid that could be useful now and might have even given the Kremlin cause to slow its revanchism. Instead Mr. Putin has seen the flimsy Western response to Crimea, following Mr. Obama's climbdown on Syria, and he has calculated he can move without fear of serious economic sanctions or a military buildup inside front-line NATO countries.



Mr. Putin may also calculate that raising the military pressure on Ukraine will help achieve what he wants without a full-scale invasion. This week envoys from the EU, U.S., Ukraine and Russia are set to meet to discuss a diplomatic solution. Mr. Putin's solution is to impose conditions on Kiev that include Russian as a second national language, a pledge not to join NATO or the EU, and a "federalist" reform that would make eastern parts of Ukraine essentially self-governing. Eventually the autonomous regions might choose to join Russia.

Mr. Putin would like nothing better than to get the EU and U.S. to tell Kiev that it has little choice but to accept these terms or risk a full-fledged invasion. If Kiev still resists, the West would have given Mr. Putin another pretext to invade his neighbor to defend his fellow Russian-speakers. With this second military action in weeks, the U.S. ought to drop its illusion that Mr. Putin is interested in diplomacy. His real goal is to redraw the postwar map of Europe to Russia's advantage, with faux diplomacy if he can, by force if necessary.
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