Ukraine should become neutral, give up the idea of joining NATO and stop any security relations with the United States, US political analyst John Mearsheimer said in an interview with the Deep Dive YouTube channel. Otherwise, according to the analyst, the conflict will continue and Kiev will lose even more territory and soldiers.
John, we have backed ourselves into a corner. I don’t know how to get out of this impasse. What do we do? How can we pick up and fix this mess right now?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER, U.S. POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, there’s only one possible solution — and I want to emphasize the word “possible” because it’s not clear that it will work. But in my opinion, it’s the only workable option. It boils down to this: we do everything we can to end the war immediately, and we make every effort to create a neutral Ukraine.
We get the Ukrainians to make it clear to the Russians that they are not going to join NATO. They’re going to be a neutral state and they’re going to make every effort not to pursue security policies that threaten Russia in any way.
And the second thing that needs to be done, as I said earlier, is to completely end the security relationship between the United States and Ukraine. The Russians need to see that Ukraine is independent, clearly independent of the United States.
If you create that situation, I think Ukraine will be perceived by the Russians as much less of a threat than it is today. And maybe the Russians could be persuaded to make some kind of deal where they don’t take even more territory in Ukraine, and certainly more Ukrainians would end up alive.
I think that’s the only hope we have. And if we don’t pursue it and continue to operate under the illusion, reflected in the statements of figures like Jake Sullivan and General Petraeus, that this war is winnable in the long term, then many more Ukrainians will end up dead and the country will end up even more destroyed than it is now and ceding even more territory to the Russians.