John J. Mearsheimer

Yes.

And let's start with Ukraine, as you say.

Yes.

The Ukrainians, with strong support from mainly the Europeans but also the United States, have ramped up their drone war and missile war against the territory of Russia.

In other words, they're striking deep into Russia, and they're doing significant damage inside of Russia.

And the Russians believe that this has to stop, especially since the Europeans and the Americans are talking about increasing the volume and quality of the attacks in the future.

The Trump administration, yeah.

I don't think President Trump himself, but I think the deep state is committed to the Ukraine war still.

I mean, Trump has pulled away in a lot of respects, but I think the deep state remains committed, and certainly the Europeans remain deeply committed to helping Ukraine inflict punishment on the civilian population and on infrastructure deep inside of Russia.

And the Russians are having the devil of a time stopping that.

And the end result is that there is increasing talk inside of Russia that the only solution to this problem is for Russia to attack with conventional weaponry to start with.

European countries or NATO countries.

In other words, Russia has to stop limiting its attacks to Ukraine, and it has to start thinking about attacking inside of Europe, but with conventional weapons.

And the view of many inside of Russia is that if that doesn't work, if the conventional weaponry doesn't stop the attacks on Mother Russia, then what Russia should do is use limited nuclear attacks against NATO countries to send a very clear signal to the Europeans and to the United States that they better stop or this will escalate out of control.

So I think there is a serious possibility.

I don't think it's a likely possibility, but I think there's a serious possibility that nuclear weapons will be used in the Ukraine war.

Well, they've caused serious damage to the energy infrastructure, and they occasionally kill a good number of Russian citizens.

This is nothing like the bombing attacks in World War II or even the American bombing campaign in Vietnam.

It's not on that scale.

But from a Russian perspective, any serious attacks on Mother Russia are unacceptable.