In this video, Prof. John Mearsheimer examines why deterrence failed before February 24, 2022, and why Russia began the war despite the enormous military risks. He connects his theory of conventional deterrence to the political and military decisions that preceded the invasion.
Mearsheimer challenges one of the central Western assumptions about Russia’s original war aims and develops an alternative explanation for how a limited attack evolved into a prolonged war of attrition.
This video was produced by John Mearsheimer and published on his YouTube channel on the 30th of July, 2026.
To read the transcript of the interview: Prof. John Mearsheimer: The Origins of the War in Ukraine | Episode 1
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John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
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