On my way to a street fair on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on Sunday, I ran into a protest by hundreds of Ukrainian Americans demanding Russian President Vladimir Putin “keep his hands off Ukraine” and the Obama Administration take action to respond to “Russian aggression.”

It’s time Americans and the world joined together in making the same demands of Putin, who as former CIA Director James Woolsey put it (see blog entry below), “is behaving very much, except for there’s no Holocaust as far as we know … the way Hitler did between 1933 and 1939. He’s grabbing Europe a bit at a time and that’s exactly what the Nazis did.”

It’s also time to demand action from the U.S. government. Organizers of the protest handed out fliers asking for help in reaching out to Senators and Members of Congress. “To date, the U.S. government has not done much to respond to Russian aggression and we need to clearly ask them to help Ukraine — the more of us (that) do it, the more were are likely to succeed.” The flier urged protesters and passersby to go to Razom for Ukraine on Facebook and search for the event “Outreach to U.S. Senators this week.”