'Regularise yourself', Beazley warns Putin

Australia's ambassador to the US Kim Beazley has called on Russian president Vladimir Putin to "regularise himself" as the crisis in Ukraine deepens.

On Tuesday, the United States suspended military co-operation with Russia due to its military intervention in Ukraine, as US Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to visit Kiev.

And as the crisis threatened to become the biggest test for global diplomacy since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Mr Beazley said "human foolishness" was threatening a potential golden era of international relations.

"If the worst comes to the worse it will be enormously damaging to Russian interests. They need to show that they are capable of restraining themselves, and capable of decent international diplomacy," Mr Beazley said.

"The globe stands poised for a potentially golden era of international relationships. that is something that can only be wrecked by human foolishness, and we don't want to see a major piece of human foolishness in the making here."

In Perth to deliver an address at the University of Western Australia, Mr Beazley said he did not think the crisis was worthy of being compared with the nuclear threat carried during the Cold War.

But referring to a post-Cold War agreement between Russia and Ukraine, Beazley said President Putin had stomped across a diplomatic line.

"Putin is massively in breach of that deal, and he needs to regularise himself," Mr Beazley told reporters.