A few links for your perusal:

– In The American Prospect I argue that people are badly overstating the significance of all this.

– In The Root, Spencer Boyer puts the conflict in the larger context of deteriorating US-Russia relations.

– In The Guardian, James Poulos provides a Russia-sympathetic point of view.

– Last, Dan Nexon’s summation of what we know about the conflict.

NB: My writing about national security issues has normally been dominated by Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc. throughout my career because those have been the high-salience issues, but Russia and the former Soviet Union is the part of the world I was originally interested in and probably still know more about. Thus on a personal level, I’ve sort of been perversely glad to see the region return to prominence even though, on the merits, these are very sad events that have been unfolding.