Explaining the Ukraine War: An Offensive Realist Critique
As we approach the end of 2025, the war in Ukraine is grinding toward the tragic conclusion that was apparent to realists from the very beginning. The situation on the ground is bleak, and the disconnect between Western rhetoric and battlefield reality has become impossible to ignore. For years, neo-realists, especially John Mearsheimer, have argued that the United States and its European allies were leading Ukraine down the primrose path to destruction. Today, as we look at the map of Eastern Europe, it brings me no pleasure to say that those predictions have largely come to pass.
To understand where we are going, we must be clear-eyed about where we are. As of this month, Russian forces control approximately 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. The recent fall of Siversk and the grinding Russian advances in the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia directions are not merely tactical setbacks for Kyiv; they are the inevitable result of a war of attrition between a great power and a smaller state that has been artificially propped up by external aid, as Mearsheimer argues. The average monthly Russian gain of nearly 180 square miles throughout 2025 demonstrates that the momentum has decisively shifted. The “stalemate” narrative of 2024 has dissolved into a slow but steady Russian dominance over the territories.
The conventional wisdom in the West that Ukraine could reclaim its 1991 borders through superior Western technology and sheer willpower seems to be a delusion, according to the neo-realists. Offensive Realism teaches us that states act according to the balance of power, not moral imperatives. Russia, viewing a NATO-aligned Ukraine as an existential threat, was always willing to pay a higher price and endure greater pain than the West was willing to bear. We are now seeing the material constraints of that reality. Ukraine faces a catastrophic manpower crisis that no amount of Western weaponry can solve. You cannot print artillery shells, and you certainly cannot print soldiers.
The path forward is grim. We are likely witnessing the transition from a hot war to a “frozen conflict,” but it will be a freezing of lines that leaves Ukraine wrecked and dismembered. Mearsheimer claims that the Russians will not conquer all of Ukraine; they never intended to. Putin is not Hitler, and he has no ambition to march to the English Channel. His goal was limited and rational: to wreck Ukraine as a functioning state so that it could never become a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. By that metric, Moscow has succeeded.
The resulting “rump state” of Ukraine will be a dysfunctional, economically crippled entity. It will rely entirely on Western life support, which will inevitably wane as domestic politics in the United States and Europe shift toward isolationism and internal concerns. The idea that this rump state will be brought into NATO is fanciful. The alliance operates by consensus, and it is hard to imagine that all members will agree to extend Article 5 protection to a country with disputed borders and a hostile superpower neighbor. To do so would be to sign up for World War III.
What is particularly tragic is that this outcome was entirely avoidable. The history here is unambiguous. The trouble started at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, when the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members.” Russian leaders made it clear at the time that this was a red line. We ignored them. We doubled down in 2014, and again in the lead-up to the 2022 invasion. The West refused to acknowledge that great powers, all great powers, including the United States, are deeply sensitive to security threats on their borders. Imagine if China built a military alliance with Canada and Mexico. The United States would destroy that arrangement immediately. Why we expected Russia to act differently remains a mystery of liberal hegemony.
Looking to 2026 and beyond, we should expect a bleak stability. Russia will likely annex the territories it currently holds, integrating them fully into the Russian Federation. There will be no peace treaty. A genuine peace requires trust, and there is zero trust between Moscow and the West. Instead, we will see a heavily militarized line of control, we can call it a new Iron Curtain, but one drawn much further east than the old one. This line will be a source of constant tension, a festering wound in the heart of Europe that guarantees instability for decades.
The West’s response has been a colossal strategic blunder. By driving Russia into the arms of China, the West has violated the cardinal rule of geopolitics: never push your adversaries together. The West has weakened its position in East Asia, the only theater that truly matters for American security in the 21st century, to fight a proxy war of little strategic value in a region where Russia holds dominance.
The Ukrainians have fought with immense courage, but courage cannot overcome structural realities. They have been the victims of a geopolitical tug-of-war that they could not win. The West encouraged them to fight a war they were destined to lose, fueled by the false hope of total victory. Now, Ukraine faces a future as a depopulated, landlocked, and impoverished buffer state. It is a tragedy of historic proportions, and the responsibility lies not just in Moscow, but in Washington, London, and Brussels. The West refused to practice the politics of realism, and Ukraine has paid the price in blood.
