The people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania certainly see it as equivalent, which is why they wanted to join NATO in the first place. Russia had been attempting to destabilize the governments of those countries by providing support to fringe parties trying to stir up the Russian-speaking minority populations, which could serve as a pretext for an "intervention" similar to that which we're seeing in Ukraine (based, supposedly, on support for a Russian-speaking minority population in the east).