Dear CCI Friends,
Professor John Mearsheimer is a renowned scholar of international relations, is a graduate of the US Military Academy, and has taught extensively at the University of Chicago. He has also written on the interaction between great powers and how it affects global relations. The article below about the Ukraine war and some of its causes may be of interest to our listserv, and is being enclosed.
As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback.
Respectfully,
The Directors
Center for Citizen Initiatives
“Who Caused the Ukraine War?”
August 5, 2024
By John J. Mearsheimer
The question of who is responsible for causing the Ukraine war has been a deeply contentious issue since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
The answer to this question matters enormously because the war has been a disaster for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that Ukraine has effectively been wrecked. It has lost a substantial amount of its territory and is likely to lose more, its economy is in tatters, huge numbers of Ukrainians are internally displaced or have fled the country, and it has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. Of course, Russia has paid a significant blood price as well. On the strategic level, relations between Russia and Europe, not to mention Russia and Ukraine, have been poisoned for the foreseeable future, which means that the threat of a major war in Europe will be with us well after the Ukraine war turns into a frozen conflict. Who bears responsibility for this disaster is a question that will not go away anytime soon and if anything is likely to become more prominent as the extent of the disaster becomes more apparent to more people.
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