On March 3, 2014, between the February 22 ousting of Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych and the March 16, Crimean referendum, Brzezinski authored an op-ed piece for "The Washington Post" entitled "What is to be done? Putin's aggression in Ukraine needs a response." He led with a link on Russian aggression; he compared Russian President Vladimir Putin's "thuggish tactics in seizing Crimea" and "thinly camouflaged invasion" to Adolf Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, and characterized Putin as a cartoon Benito Mussolini, but stopped well short of advocating that the U.S. go to war. Rather, he suggested that NATO should be put on high alert and recommended "to avert miscalculations". He explicitly stated that reassurances be given to "Russia that it is not seeking to draw Ukraine into NATO."