Oct 19, 2026 #mearsheimer#ukrainewar#russia
Who really caused the Ukraine war? John Mearsheimer tells MEPs the West provoked it. Here’s his case against the ‘Putin imperialist’ story. What You Need to Know • His headline claim: Mearsheimer argues the US and its European allies ‘provoked the war’ by pursuing NATO membership for Ukraine, while acknowledging Russia started it by invading in February 2022. • Five problems with the ‘Putin the imperialist’ story: he says there is no pre-war evidence Putin wanted to conquer all of Ukraine, Russia invaded with too few troops (his estimate: at most 190,000; Ukraine’s commander Syrskyi: 100,000), Russia sought talks days after the invasion, Putin proposed written security guarantees in December 2021, and there is no evidence of plans against other states. • His sources: he cites Lavrov’s January 2022 remark that ‘the key to everything’ is NATO not expanding east, the 2008 Burns memo calling Ukraine in NATO ‘the brightest of all red lines’, and Angela Merkel saying Putin would see it as ‘a declaration of war’. • On the peace talks: he says negotiations began four days after the invasion and ended when Ukraine, ‘with prodding from Britain and the United States’, walked away. These are Mearsheimer’s claims, and many Western and Ukrainian officials dispute them. • The West’s three prongs: NATO expansion, EU expansion and promoting pro-Western regime change in Ukraine, which he says Russia feared, with NATO the most.
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