No less an authority than Mikhail Gorbachev is worried that, a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War will return. It is hard to disagree: With confirmation that heavy convoys moving through Eastern Ukraine in recent days crossed from Russia, the fighting there looks set to restart in earnest.

The post-1989 goal of building a Europe "whole and free," including Russia, is not lost. It's just not imminent. So, for now, welcome to the Cool War. Unlike during the Cold War, the threat is regional, not global, and the chance remains for reconciliation, however remote that may seem at the moment.

To deal with this reality, U.S. and European leaders should consider reviving some of the Cold War-era mechanisms that once kept regional confrontations -- and there were many in the decades when the U.S. and the Soviet Union faced off as the world's two superpowers -- from escalating.

Ukraine is not the only potential flashpoint today: They exist across the former Soviet Union. A recent report by the European Leadership Network also details 40 "near miss" incidents between Russian and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces over the past eight months, from a Russian plane that nearly hit an airliner taking off from the Copenhagen airport to a jet buzzing a Canadian frigate so closely, the ship locked its radar on the plane. Three of the incidents involved a "high probability of causing casualties or a direct military confrontation." On Wednesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said he planned to extend long-range bomber patrols as far as the Gulf of Mexico.

David Fuller's view

Subscribers may wish to view the map in this article showing the recent Russian close encounters with NATO and also EU commercial flights in the Baltic and North Sea regions.  Putin has a weak economic hand which is worsening, so he is trying to intimidate with his superior military forces.  This remains a dangerous situation for all of Europe.