As has happened before, Mrs Clinton has her facts and her history mixed up .
I'm not a fan of Putin's but I am a fan of the facts.
There are a number of facts that need to be considered.
The Russians have stationed their fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea continuously since 1783. Crimea was part of the Soviet Union until 1954, when Khrushchev made it part of the Ukraine region of the USSR for administrative purposes.
The Ukraine itself did not exist as an independent state until 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.
There is some important history here, both past and recent. Eastern and Western parts of Ukraine are not a seamless harmony.
In World War II, Western Ukrainians greeted the Nazi invaders as heroes, joining with them, while the Eastern Ukraine remained loyal to the USSR. The Ukrainian Galicia SS division fought alongside the Nazis, against the Allies, until 1945. Continuity of far-right, pro-Nazi ideology has been noted in the Svoboda Party, part of the "coalition" which overthrew the democratically-elected but corrupt government of Yanukovych.
Critics point to neocons in the US State Department as having supported this coup and having even advised as to who the new appointed leaders should be.
The revolt began when Ukrainian President Yanukovych refused a deal with the EU, preferring an economic aid package from Russia.
The seduction of the Ukraine to joining the EU was, according to former US Congressman Dennis Kucinich, not only an economic plan but involved a defence relationship, one that would put Nato on Russia's doorstep.
The last time something of that order happened was the 1960s, when the US put nuclear missiles into Turkey, next door to the USSR. Khrushchev's Soviet response was placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba and we came within a hairbreadth of annihilating the planet.
The Cold War is over despite the efforts of Republican neocons and Democratic hawks like Mrs Clinton to restart it. European - especially German - and Russian economies are interdependent. Germany, which has been less bellicose than the US, gets 35 per cent of its gas from Russia and sells 40 per cent of its goods there. Cameron and Obama can threaten economic sanctions but Merkel won't be eager to sign on.
Obama needs Putin's help with Iran's nuclear deal, just as Putin helped Obama extricate himself from ill-considered threats to bomb Syria by getting the Syrians to surrender their chemical weapons.
This time there's room for gratitude that economic self-interest will act as restraint and the intermeshed economies of the West and Russia will put a brake on everyone's pugnacious impulses. Putin, for all his bare-chested showmanship, is - to use George W Bush's appraisal - cold-blooded and not hot-headed.
And that careful, cerebral man in the White House is the one answering that midnight phone call and not the woman who voted for the Iraq War without ever reading the National Intelligence Estimate with its doubts about the WMD used as rationale for that other pre-emptive and legally questionable war.
Jay Kuten is an American trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
