Now they know that we know that they know. That’s the takeaway from Josh Rogin’s follow-up scoop on John Kerry’s address to the Trilateral Commission (this one co-authored with Eli Lake), in which Kerry reveals the administration has proof Russian officials are closely involved in fomenting the unrest in eastern Ukraine. The question is, will it impact the administration’s policy now that the White House knows that the public knows that the White House knows Russia is involved?

Of course, Russia’s involvement is not a surprise; everyone “knew,” on some level, precisely what Vladimir Putin was up to. But having proof is different, and having that proof in the hands of the administration is different as well, and so is the public knowing that the proof is in the hands of the administration, and that any policy recommendations are made with the full knowledge of Russian interventionism in Ukraine. Here’s Rogin with the crux of Kerry’s condemnation of Russia:

“Intel is producing taped conversations of intelligence operatives taking their orders from Moscow and everybody can tell the difference in the accents, in the idioms, in the language. We know exactly who’s giving those orders, we know where they are coming from,” Kerry said at a private meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington. A recording of Kerry’s remarks was obtained by The Daily Beast.

Kerry didn’t name specific Russian officials implicated in the recordings. But he claimed that the intercepts provided proof of the Russians deliberately fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine—and lying about it to U.S. officials and the public.

“It’s not an accident that you have some of the same people identified who were in Crimea and in Georgia and who are now in east Ukraine,” said Kerry. “This is insulting to everybody’s intelligence, let alone to our notions about how we ought to be behaving in the 21st century. It’s thuggism, it’s rogue state-ism. It’s the worst order of behavior.”

The proof, as Kerry describes it, is helpful in a strategic sense since it would be easier to identify Russian troublemakers elsewhere in Moscow’s near abroad–Moldova, say–if they move on to other targets the way they did in invading Georgia and then Ukraine. And that latter point raises another issue here. This is about more than dueling protests and raising voices.

The New York Times illustrates the escalation of the conflict in a tale of two Ukrainian cities–Kharkiv, where the mayor was left in critical condition after an assassination attempt, and Konstantinovka, where power seemingly switched hands. The disturbing aspect to this is that neither of these two cities is a locus of violence compared to other parts of eastern Ukraine. The Times reports:

The crisis in eastern Ukraine took dark turns on Monday as the mayor of the country’s second-largest city was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt and masked antigovernment militants seized control of this city almost effortlessly, laying bare the limits of the interim government’s control.

The violence was followed by a pro-government rally in the eastern city of Donetsk that was broken up by a rival pro-Russian crowd that beat and scattered the demonstrators shortly after they gathered, while the police stepped aside and looked on.

One Ukrainian soldier was killed by an explosion in the Donetsk region and another wounded as they cleared an obstacle, the Defense Ministry said, in a statement suggesting its troops may have for the first time been struck by an improvised roadside bomb.

Taken together, the events pointed to the further enfeeblement of the interim government in Kiev, which came to power after chasing President Viktor F. Yanukovych from office in February.

They also provided further evidence of the near irrelevance of a diplomatic agreement reached in Geneva this month aimed at defusing what remains a still escalating crisis.

As Jonathan wrote earlier, the situation in Ukraine seems to be a drag on President Obama’s approval ratings, with his handling of the crisis finding fewer takers than his handling of the ObamaCare fiasco. The Times story offers a clue why that is. The president has taken to insisting he has neither the time nor the inclination to explain himself before launching into bizarre rants accusing his critics of being warmongers. The alternative to total war, according to the president and his allies, is the administration’s “smart diplomacy.”

But even his fellow antiwar voices in the press are ridiculing the deal his administration struck in Ukraine as being of “near irrelevance” and the government the White House is supposedly helping to stand up showing signs of “further enfeeblement.” The whole thing is a very sad, very dangerous, and increasingly bloody saga of American diffidence.

And Kerry’s comments (should) complicate this further for the White House because the Post/ABC poll was conducted before Rogin’s latest scoop. The public was already dissatisfied with the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s provocations, but now they’ve been told that the administration knew how much of this Moscow was directly responsible for.