Mearsheimer has been consistently if depressingly prescient about the state of the war. He argues that Russia is not interested in a peace agreement that is not entirely on its own terms. He also thinks that Russia has a distinctly superior position in the military conflict. We will unfortunately soon see how well the Russian forces do against Ukraine in 2025.
Russia's biggest advantage is manpower and it has shown a willingness to throw soldiers at Ukrainian positions to gain a few metres at a time. Ukrainian military intelligence says about 620,000 Russian soldiers are operating in Ukraine and Kursk and Kyiv believes thousands of troops have entered Ukraine since the start of the year.No one seems to think that either the Russian or the Ukrainian side is about to fall apart. Although surprises often happen in wars. Active advocates for more US and/or European aid to Ukraine sometimes make it sound like that Ukraine could clearly win if they just got more Western aid. Timothy Snyder, for instance, wrote in June of last year:
Fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops has also intensified in the past week with assaults on the front line up by about 30%, according to Ukrainian military chiefs, who believe they are part of a spring offensive by Russia.
Until now Russian forces have been advancing slowly north and west of Donetsk, towards the city of Pokrovsk, and have recently been closing a Ukrainian pocket along the front line south west of Toretsk, according to experts at the Institute for the Study of War. (2)
Ukraine can win if Europeans and Americans believe it can, and continue to help. ... The war is not going well for Russia on the actual battlefield. The Europeans and the Americans are bearing essentially no costs. But if they can somehow decide that they are weary, Russia can win. (3)In February, the Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institute offered this sober evaluation:
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 decision to invade increasingly looks like an epic blunder, but he has continued the war, despite rising costs that also include sanctions on Russia. He placed his economy on a war footing and believes Russia can outlast Ukraine, given its larger population and economy. He has shown no serious interest in negotiating except on his terms.Now, if NATO were to throw its full force into fighting on Ukraine’s side, that would obviously change the military calculations. But one of the military calculations that would change would be the enormously altered potential for escalatory risk.
Putin fundamentally does not accept Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign and independent state. He initially demanded that Ukraine demilitarize, accept neutrality, and recognize Crimea as Russian and the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” as independent states. In September 2022, Putin supposedly annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson—even though Russian forces did not occupy all of those territories. He made Kyiv’s acceptance of those annexations a condition for a settlement. It is not just land but the people on the land that are under Russian occupation. Those areas have been described as “a totalitarian hell” where “all traces of Ukraine are being expunged.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top demands in 2022 were full Russian withdrawal and restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders, compensation for damages in Ukraine, and bringing war criminals to account (that would include Putin, indicted by the International Criminal Court for the removal of Ukrainian children to Russia). Many Ukrainians regard the war as existential, which explains the country’s fierce resistance. (4)
Ukraine is not a NATO member. Countries like Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that border on Russia are NATO members. So in the real world, NATO planners have to calculate what would happen if they made a major direct military commitment to fight Russia and Ukraine, and Russia responded by attacking some or all of those NATO countries just mentioned?
But that kind of coldly practical consideration rarely if ever comes up in Western discussions about the war, because cheering for Our Own Side takes center stage. And, at this point, Trump is clearly unwilling to do such a thing, and without full US participation, the other NATO allies would not be able to do that without full US support and involvement. Trump’s military threats against NATO allies Canada and Denmark (over Greenland) are at the moment far more credible that any suggestion that Trump would support a direct NATO war in Ukraine.
The more immediate real-world question is how much aid and what kind of aid Europeans will be able and willing to provide to Ukraine. There no magic bullet to drive Russia out of Crimea and the other Ukrainian territory it currently controls. And there also the gloomy consideration that as long as they can control the escalatory pressures, it may be to their immediately advantage to keep the combat in Ukraine going for the indefinite future, which would make overt aggression by Russia against actual NATO allies less likely.
Ukraine is fighting a foreign invader, and they have been holding out for over three years of active combat since 2022. Nationalism and patriotism are powerful political forces. They can’t always beat military force. But they can make the victory for the enemy costly.
If Donald Trump had any credibility as a negotiating partner, and if he had staffed the Trump 2.0 team with actual professionals instead of cronies and toxic clowns, he might have been able to come up with some kind of substantive and constructive peace deal. But that’s not who he is.
The Russians are unlikely to accept any kind of peace settlement to which the US isn’t also a party. And Trump’s remarkably chaotic diplomacy around tariffs has every country the US deals with wondering if it is willing to honor an international deal for more than two hours after it’s concluded.
Scott Lucas in this Times Radio presentation talks at some length about Trump’s chaotic and incompetent diplomacy and the developing situation in the Russia-Ukraine War. Lucas speculates that Russia assumed that Trump would be more functional in being able to deliver what they wanted from him. It’s safe to say that Trump has pivoted to a more pro-Russia position. But he’s showing himself to be remarkable incompetent at delivering anything of constructive substance in foreign policy – even a competently executed pro-Russia policy pivot. (5)
Notes:
(1) Prof. John Mearsheimer : Can Ukraine and Israel Embrace Peace? Judge Napolitano-Judging Freedom YouTube channel 04/24/2025.<https://www.youtube.com/live/k3ioQHvJrcs?si=5IIpqDvuVA7n9kju> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).
(2) Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia. BBC News 04/15/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).
(3) Snyder, Timothy (2024): In Their Own Words. Thinking about ... 06/11/2024. <https://snyder.substack.com/p/in-their-own-words> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).
(4) Pifer, Steven (2025): Russia-Ukraine after three years of large-scale war. Brookings Institute 02/19/2025. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/russia-ukraine-after-three-years-of-large-scale-war/> (Accessed: 2025-24-04).
(5) Trump worried and will try to 'disappear' once Ukraine peace talks collapse. Times Radio YouTube channel 04/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/4i9Sh2xBn3I?si=1NtAsYWIh3f5sMm9> (Accessed: 2025-25-04).
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