John J. Mearsheimer

I kind of don't get it.

I think you're going to get a frozen conflict.

And what's going to happen here is that the Russians are almost certainly going to end up conquering the four oblasts that they have now annexed.

They fully control one of those oblasts, Luhansk.

The one that gets the most attention in the media today, Luhansk, they control 85% of that.

Donetsk, and they control about 75% of Zaporozhye and about 75% of Kherson.

I think they will continue the war until they fully control all the territory in those four oblasts, which again, they've annexed along with Crimea.

I would not be surprised if they actually end up taking more territory.

I wouldn't be surprised if they take Odessa

and Kharkiv as well.

But that remains to be seen.

I think it's quite clear that their progress on the battlefield has been relatively slow, and it's in large part not because the Ukrainian ground forces are formidable troops, but because of drones.

I think drones have made it very difficult for either side to move.

But I think the Russians will end up conquering a huge slice of eastern Ukraine.

And at some point, the Ukrainians and the Russians will stop firing at each other.

There will be an armistice.

This will be the frozen conflict.

Ukraine will be a dysfunctional rump state, which it already is.

And it will not join NATO.

So the Russians will have achieved their major objective of preventing Ukraine from joining NATO.