It seems evident that U.S. President Barack Obama today still does not understand how much he owes to Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko. If he did, and if the cease-fire and negotiation terms Poroshenko has signed with the country's pro-Russian insurgents in the southeast of his country and their friends in Moscow continue to hold, he would thank Poroshenko for an invaluable gift of peace to Americans and NATO, as well as to his own country.

Obama said not long ago that his foreign policy principle was "not doing stupid stuff." At about the same time his State Department and CIA were conspicuously guiding and supporting a coup d'état in Ukraine that was the exact contradiction to the Obama policy statement. The Ukrainian Parliament's first post-coup act was to pass a resolution outlawing the use of Russian in Ukraine, which is the native language of more than a fifth of the population of a country that has always been intimately involved in the history, religion and culture of the Russian nation. Nothing could have been more stupid.

The result of that coup has been a civil struggle inside Ukraine, pitting a significant fraction of Ukraine's Russian-speakers, semi-clandestinely backed by Russia's President Vladimir Putin, against the nation's majority.