Three recommendations

Strategika, an online publication from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, has three very good articles about the Ukrainian problem in its current issue:

Victor Davis Hanson is the author of What Makes Vladimir Run?  Hanson's writings are always interesting because he is a historian, and therefore often brings to the discussion a different, historically-based, perspective. He is of course a conservative, but a fairly pragmatic one.  He certainly believes more of our leaders, including our present and recent past presidents, ought to know more history so that they wouldn't be so naive. I can't disagree with him on that!

We Can End Russia's War Against Ukraine, by Paul Gregory, outlines a series of common-sense steps that the author argues would end Russian aggression in that area, if and only if we and the Europeans have the will to implement them. Gregory is a well-known scholar of Russian affairs, and presumably has some insight into how the Russian leadership thinks.

I have mentioned works by Angelo Codeilla in previous posts.  He seems to me one of the more realistic, hard-headed, pragmatic thinkers in foreign policy, and has been a consistent critic of the fuzzy-headed, inconsistent, ideology-driven foreign policy of our recent administrations, Republican and Democratic alike. His piece, To Restrain Russia, Drop The Ambiguity, follows this pattern, and make a persuasive case that the US administration's (and Europe's) constant vacillation simply encourages Putin, just as similar big power vacillation encouraged Hitler in his time.