Ukraine crisis - Important lessons we might learn

The crisis in Ukraine and Crimea has reached such a critical point that patience, but not appeasement, must be the order of the day.

Rash, poorly conceived assertiveness by any of the powers seems more likely to inflame rather than resolve the situation.

As pressure mounts on all sides to confound the ambitions of the other, there is potential for the kind of grand gesture, for a great show of defiant, swaggering force, that could turn this conflict into the kind of catastrophe that would show again that Europe and Russia must, every few generations, underline their differences in another destructive cycle of mistrust, misunderstanding and something approaching cultural and political incompatibility.