John Mearsheimer: prediction

Transcript context

…Which part? That he would… The imperialist part, the sense that he sought to conquer all of Ukraine, and move on and conquer- There’s no evidence he was interested in conquering all of Ukraine. There was no evidence beforehand that he was interested in conquering any of Ukraine. And there’s no way that an army that had 190,000 troops, at the most, could have conquered all of Ukraine, it’s just impossible. As I like to emphasize, when the Germans went into Poland in 1939, and the Germans, you want to remember, were only intent on conquering the western half of Poland, because the Soviets, who came in later that month, were going to conquer the eastern half of Poland. So the western half of Poland is much smaller than Ukraine, and the Germans went in with 1.5 million troops. If Vladimir Putin were bent on conquering all of Ukraine, he would’ve needed at least 2 million troops. I would argue he’d need 3 million troops, because not only did he need to conquer the country, you then have to occupy it. But the idea that 190,000 troops was sufficient for conquering all of Ukraine, it’s not a serious argument. Furthermore, he was not interested in conquering Ukraine, and that’s why, in March 2022, this is immediately after the war starts, he is negotiating with Zelensky to end the war. There are serious negotiations taking place in Istanbul involving the Turks. And Naftali Bennett, who was the Israeli prime minister at the time, was deeply involved in negotiating with both Putin and Zelensky to end the war. Well, if he was interested, Putin, in conquering all of Ukraine, why in God’s name would he be negotiating with Zelensky to end the war? And of course, what they were negotiating about was NATO expansion into Ukraine, which was the principal cause of the war. People in the West don’t want to hear that argument because if it is true, which it is, then the West is principally responsible for this bloodbath that’s now taking place. And of course, the West doesn’t want to be principally responsible. It wants to blame Vladimir Putin. So we’ve invented this story out of whole cloth that he is an aggressor, that he’s the second coming of Adolf Hitler, and that what he did in Ukraine was try to conquer all of it and he failed. But with a little bit of luck, he probably would’ve conquered all of it, and he’d now be in the Baltic States, and eventually end up dominating all of Eastern Europe. As I said, I think there’s no evidence to support this. So maybe there’s a lot of things to ask there. Maybe just to linger on NATO expansion, what is NATO expansion? What is the threat of NATO expansion and why is this such a concern for Russia?…

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