John Mearsheimer

That's the conventional thinking.

Yeah, yeah.

And the idea is that he is bent on creating a greater Russia.

And even more so, he's interested in dominating Eastern Europe, if not all of Europe, and

And that Ukraine was the first stop on the train line.

And what he wanted to do was to conquer all of Ukraine, incorporate it into a greater Russia, and then he would move on and conquer other countries.

This is the conventional wisdom.

My view is there is no evidence, let me emphasize, zero evidence to support that argument.

There's no evidence he was interested in conquering all of Ukraine.

There's no evidence beforehand that he was interested in conquering any of Ukraine.

And there's no way that an army that had 190,000 troops at the most...

could have conquered all of Ukraine.

Just impossible.

As I like to emphasize, when the Germans went into Poland in 1939, and the Germans, you want to remember, were only intent on conquering the western half of Poland because the Soviets...

who came in later that month, were going to conquer the eastern half of Poland.

So the western half of Poland is much smaller than Ukraine.

And the Germans went in with 1.5 million troops.

If

Vladimir Putin were bent on conquering all of Ukraine, he would have needed at least 2 million troops.

I would argue he'd need 3 million troops because not only do you need to conquer the country, you then have to occupy it.