Nothing good's going to come from a "permanently aggressive" stance, either.
Someone said something smart at the very start of this war, forget who: "the only thing more dangerous than Russia winning this, is Russia losing".
They're getting Crimea, they're getting the Donbass, maybe a little more. Them's the facts, Jack, as Biden would say. It's just a matter of how painful/painless we want to make it for the Ukrainians, and a matter of whether we're dumb enough to escalate it into more than it needs to be, involving more countries as actual frontline belligerents.