In this video, political scientist and international relations scholar John Mearsheimer examines recent statements by Iuliia Mendel, who served as President Volodymyr Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021. In a new article and a speech to the European Parliament, Mendel warns that the continuation of the war could be pushing Ukraine toward an existential national crisis.
How does a former close member of Zelensky’s team justify such a drastic assessment? Mearsheimer examines her argument across five areas: demographics, the economy, territory, politics and security. The central question is how deeply the war has already transformed Ukraine — and what the long-term consequences could mean for the country’s future.
This video was produced by John Mearsheimer and published on his YouTube channel on the 22nd of September, 2026. We have translated it into German and are republishing it today to help build opinion on this issue in Germany and beyond.
To read the transcript of the interview: Prof. Mearsheimer: Is Ukraine Committing National Suicide?
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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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