The Leading Realist Theorist Ignores Reality to Depict Putin as the Victim
John Mearsheimer’s analytic framework blinds him to the Russian dictator’s real motives for invading democratic Ukraine
When asked this January what was standing in the way of a Ukraine peace deal, President Trump gave a one-word answer: “Zelenskyy.” The Kremlin immediately and approvingly agreed. It was a telling moment—not just as a diplomatic embarrassment, but as a window into how thoroughly the blame-Ukraine narrative has migrated from academic theory into live policy. The theory in question is University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer’s brand of “realism” within international relations.
Ideas really do have consequences. That claim may seem obvious to many, but its rejection is a core component of Mearsheimer’s brand of realism, and central to one of the most glaringly erroneous accounts of why Russia attacked Ukraine. Many realists—Mearsheimer chief among them—repeatedly insist that Russia is the victim of bullying by liberal democracies. They claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a defensive response rather than an act of imperialist aggression and have rushed to “explain” Russia to the rest of us. That blame-Ukraine narrative not only naively mirrors Kremlin propaganda; it is wholly at odds with reality.
Such downplaying of the relevance of ideas in the international arena has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, as well as of its implications. The core error: by treating states as unitary actors (“billiard balls” in his words) pursuing clear geopolitical interests, Mearsheimer cannot see that Putin is not acting in Russia’s interest—he is acting in his own, and a democratic Ukraine threatens his grip on power.
In a 2014 essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” published after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “Moscow’s position ... and the logic behind it” are “Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory” and that the liberal democracies “added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite.” After mischaracterizing the democratic uprising against the pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych as an “illegal overthrow” and a “coup,” he argued that Putin (“a first-class strategist”) invaded Ukraine “as a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster.”
Yanukovych was not “ousted”—he abandoned the country and fled to Russia. And before his removal was formalized soldiers, trucks, and other equipment—with no markings identifying them as Russian military forces—were already conveniently present in Crimea. The Kremlin initially denied that the invading troops were Russian forces and called the question itself a “provocation.” Putin insisted that they were local “self-defense” forces who obtained their Russian uniforms in a “store.” They also carried Russian-made machine guns and grenade launchers. It wasn’t until the next year that Putin said, “I gave orders to the Defense Ministry—why hide it?—to deploy special forces of the GRU (military intelligence) as well as marines and commandos there under the guise of reinforcing security for our military facilities in Crimea.” Putin even later denied that he had denied that the Russian army had invaded, admitting that “The Russian Army was always there.” On the specific claim of a spontaneous reaction, the record is unambiguous: Mearsheimer was wrong.
Mearsheimer’s fallback argument is that NATO and the European Union were “expanding,” and the Kremlin feared they would “expand” into Ukraine. What might “expansion” mean? Russia, both past and present, expands in a very direct way: Russian armies conquer territories, torture and murder local opposition, import Russian colonists, deport local people by the thousands and millions, and inflict state terror on them. But NATO “expansion” is quite a different matter. All post-Soviet memberships have resulted from extended debates within democratic nations—all with multi-party systems, contested elections, and free media—after which their governments asked to be admitted to the defensive alliance.
That historical record of democratic deliberation and freely chosen partnerships hasn’t stopped Mearsheimer from referring to the European Union and NATO as “marching eastward,” or from insisting that Putin ordered the invasion in 2014 and the escalation in 2022 because Russia felt threatened. Rather than provide any evidence of the said threat to Russian territory, he instead tells us that “it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.” In other words, if Putin says it’s a threat, then it’s a threat that justifies conquest—no other evidence is offered or required.
No reasonable person believes that NATO was likely to invade or to annex Russian territory. But if there is no territorial threat, what threat is there? Here Mearsheimer again completely misconstrues Kremlin policy. He laughably insisted in 2014 that Moscow clearly has “an interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank” and that Ukraine’s allies should “work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow.” In what other cases has the Kremlin sought to have “prosperous and stable” neighbors?
A peaceful and prosperous Ukraine is inherently a threat, not to Russia, but to Putin. The danger to Putin’s personal hold on power is posed by the example—the mere existence—of a prosperous, stable, democratic, and free neighbor. Ukraine has “provoked” Putin by not being Belarus: an impoverished, rickety, and weak state ruled by a dictator obedient to Putin.
Why the Invasion and the Erasure of the Ukrainian People?
The real reason for the invasion is not that NATO is threatening Russia, that Ukraine is dominated by “Nazis,” or that “Russophobia” in Donbas “looks like genocide”—all of which Putin claims without proof. Instead, as Putin told us clearly in 2021, he views territorial expansion as necessary to defend the “Russian World” while asserting that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” It doesn’t matter what the Ukrainians themselves think about that, because they are to have no say in the matter.
This notion of the “Russian World” has been key to Putin’s foreign policy as far back as 2005, when Putin called the collapse of the USSR “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century,” and complained that “Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.”
Addressing Russian ambassadors in July 2014, Putin offered an expansive definition of who belongs to the “Russian World”: “When I speak of Russians and Russian-speaking citizens I am referring to those people who consider themselves part of the broad Russian community, they may not necessarily be ethnic Russians, but they consider themselves Russian people.”
In Putin’s logic, the invasion of another country is defending the “Russian World.” In 2022, Putin even compared himself to Peter the Great, whose wars of conquest against Sweden meant that, “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it … He was not taking away anything, he was returning. […] He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing. Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well.” Last June in St. Petersburg he explained, “I’ve said it before, Russians and Ukrainians are one people. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours. There’s an old rule that wherever a Russian soldier sets foot, that’s ours.”
Putin argues that Russians and Ukrainians share a common medieval baptism at the Dnieper River and a common religion, language, and culture, before conceding magnanimously that “the Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian language, dances, and music are wonderful. I for one always admire it.” Ukrainians are merely Russian subjects who have colorful dances and music. The ideological claim precedes the military one: to assert that Ukrainians and Russians are one people is already to erase Ukraine as a nation before a single soldier crosses a border.
That is the point Mearsheimer’s theories cannot reach: Putin considers an independent, democratic, prosperous, and stable Ukraine to be a threat to his personal hold on power. As Wladimir Klitschko wrote in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in May of 2022, “For the Russian imperialist regime, our very existence is a provocation because we are a democracy.” That’s precisely why Putin called for the “denazification” of Ukraine, the neighboring country whose Russian-speaking Jewish president was elected in a contested election over an Orthodox Christian. (“Nazism,” for the Kremlin, means simply not submitting to Russian conquest.)
What ‘Realism’ Cannot Realize
How did an intelligent man get this so wrong? The answer involves two distinct analytical failures. The first is methodological. Mearsheimer’s “realist” theory describes international relations as “a state of relentless security competition, with the possibility of war always in the background.” He insists that states do act in what they perceive to be their interests, but also that they “should always act according to their own self-interest.” The attractiveness of the theory lies in the robust claim that states always act in certain ways. But introducing the normative claim about what they “should” do is a telling sleight of hand. Moreover, the theory leaves little to no space for ideas or values—except as factors to be tossed aside when liberal democracies are involved.
Mearsheimer considers “liberal institutionalism” as a competing theory of international order and rejects it—without considering it thoroughly. Central to liberal institutionalism is the peaceful interconnection among nations through freedom of trade, which is borne out by abundant evidence: the massive growth of international trade has coincided with a steep decline in war among nations whose economies are entwined, as political scientists such as Erik Gartzke and Patrick McDonald have robustly demonstrated. But—and this is the distinction realism cannot make—the pacifying effect of trade holds among liberal market economies, not among state-dominated ones. Putin’s Russia is the latter: Putin’s own gas station with a flag and an army.
However, the “liberal” in liberal institutionalism matters even if Mearsheimer regards liberal principles such as democracy, pluralism, and free trade as beside the point, because “as an analytical matter, realism does not distinguish between ‘good’ states and ‘bad’ states, but essentially treats them like billiard balls of varying size.” In realist theory, all states are forced to seek the same goal: maximum relative security. Mearsheimer defends that simplification by insisting that “realism merely seeks to explain how the world works.” In doing so, however, he closes his eyes to the role of ideology in determining what counts as an interest: states have pursued racial purity and imperial destiny as readily as security and wealth—sometimes over security and wealth, as Putin is doing right now. Surely Russians would be better off on both counts if he had refrained from invading Ukraine. Mearsheimer’s so-called realism is deeply unrealistic.
The second failure is more specific and more consequential. By positing that states are unitary actors always acting to secure “their” interests, realism blinds itself to dynamics within state structures. States are not solid billiard balls; they are complex assemblies of persons, powers, and relationships, more like interacting clouds of interests, some of which are aligned and some of which conflict. By ignoring the interior of the “ball,” Mearsheimer fails to account for the divergence of interests between a ruler and a state.
Putin has made it clear through both words and deeds that he sees no “interest in having a prosperous and stable” neighborhood; the view that Putin has such an interest is a preposterous fantasy entirely of Mearsheimer’s creation. Putin’s ideology of the “Russian World” explains why he has flagrantly broken international treaties, including the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to Ukraine’s accession to the International Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for a Russian guarantee “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”
A prosperous, democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border is not a military threat to Russia, but it is an exemplary threat to Putin personally: evidence, visible to ordinary Russians, that a neighboring, predominantly Slavic and Orthodox nation can choose liberal democracy and make it work—which is fatal to the authoritarian regime that Putin has fastened on the Russian people.
What Is at Stake
What we are witnessing is not merely a clash of billiard balls but also of fundamental values and principles; the realist framework cannot see that, because it is designed not to. A hyper-nationalistic dictatorship has attacked a pluralistic democracy, not because the dictator feared any loss of territory or any threat to the security of the country he effectively owns, but because he perceives the existence of that liberal democracy as a threat to his own personal hold on power.
The stakes of his misreading of recent history are not merely academic. If Mearsheimer’s framework cannot explain why this war happened, it cannot reliably predict what comes next—or identify which democracies are next in line to be designated as threats. Any democracy, under Mearsheimer’s account, can threaten an autocracy merely by existing successfully, wherever it might demonstrate to a captive population that another way of organizing political life is possible.
Prudence in how democracies respond to Russian aggression is entirely warranted—reasonable people can and do differ on questions of strategy, risk, and response. Such prudence, in turn, requires clarity about what is actually happening, and attaining such clarity is precisely what Mearsheimer’s unrealistic theorizing prevents.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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The horrors of Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing (and I was frequently in Yugoslavia before the wars broke out and it was clear that he was preparing something terrible) led to NATO’s participation and Kosovo’s independence; regardless of one’s views (I was opposed to NATO bombardment and engagement), that was not annexation. It also does not affect my statement that no rational person thought NATO was likely to invade or to annex Russian territory.
When Finland joined NATO in response to Russian aggression, Putin pulled troops from the Russian border and sent them to Ukraine. From a fear of NATO invading and annexing Russian territory? Clearly not.
I was also thinking about what M gets wrong. I like this: "Mearsheimer cannot see that Putin is not acting in Russia’s interest—he is acting in his own, and a democratic Ukraine threatens his grip on power."
Afterthought: About which other leaders can we say the same? And how does international relations theory conceptualize how interests of the country do (not) align with the interests of the leaders?