John J. Mearsheimer

The war starts February 24th.

Shortly thereafter, I mean, a day or two later, Putin sends a message to Zelensky and says, let's start negotiating.

They first start negotiating in Belarus, and then they go to Istanbul.

These are the famous Istanbul negotiations, okay?

This is in March, early April of 2022, almost immediately after the war starts.

And it looks like the Ukrainians and the Russians may be able to cut a deal.

They did not cut the deal, but they're getting closer and closer.

Things are working out very well.

What happens?

Boris Johnson, with support from the United States, of course, comes in and he tells the Ukrainians to walk away from the negotiations.

Now, the question you want to ask yourself is, why did this happen?

The reason it happened is that we thought that economic sanctions...

would bring the Russians to their knees and that the Ukrainians who we had armed and trained, we meaning the West, had armed and trained between 2014 when the crisis first broke out and 2022 when the war broke out, the actual war.

In that context,

In that eight-year period, we had armed, we meaning the West, had armed and trained the Ukrainians.

And they were a quite formidable fighting force, as the Russians found out over the course of 2022.

We believed that the Ukrainian army on the battlefield, coupled with economic sanctions, would do the Russians in.

And that's why we told Zelensky to walk away from the negotiations in Istanbul.

And you want to also remember that late in the fall of that year, 2022, General Milley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, understood that the Ukrainians by that point in time had reached the high watermark.

Remember, the Ukrainians had launched two successful offensives against the Russians in 2022, one in Kharkiv, one in Kherson.