John Mearsheimer

But the idea that 190,000 troops was sufficient for conquering Ukraine.

All of Ukraine is not a serious argument.

Furthermore, he was not interested in conquering Ukraine.

And that's why in March 2022, this is immediately after the war starts, he is negotiating with Zelenskyy.

end the war.

There are serious negotiations taking place in Istanbul involving the Turks, and Naftali Bennett, who was the Israeli prime minister at the time, was deeply involved in negotiating with both Putin and Zelensky to end the war.

Well, if he was interested, Putin, in conquering all of Ukraine, why in God's name would he be negotiating with Zelensky to end the war?

And of course, what they were negotiating about was NATO expansion into Ukraine, which was the principal cause of the war.

people in the West don't want to hear that argument because if it is true, which it is, then the West is principally responsible for this bloodbath that's now taking place.

And of course, the West doesn't want to be principally responsible.

It wants to blame Vladimir Putin.

So we've invented this story out of whole cloth that he is an aggressor, that he's the second coming of Adolf Hitler, and that what he did in Ukraine was try to

to conquer all of it.

And he failed.

But with a little bit of luck, he probably would have conquered all of it.

And he'd now be in the Baltic states and eventually end up dominating all of Eastern Europe.

As I said, I think there's no evidence to support this.

NATO was a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

It's a military alliance which has at its heart the United States of America, which is the most powerful state on the planet.

it is perfectly understandable that Russia is not going to want that military alliance on its doorstep.