Mearsheimer knows: The Russian war machine adapts and grinds on

It had been their major goal since their summer 2024 offensive. Now Russian forces have completed the encirclement, applying their signature cauldron tactics and capturing the vital Donetsk logistics centre. Pokrovsk has fallen – and John Mearsheimer’s realism has triumphed. Not only did the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago see it coming, but his latest analysis sounds an alarm crucial to the EU.

The West, and Europe most of all, needs to come to terms with reality before it is too late. Mearsheimer is one of international relations’ sharpest minds. A West Point graduate turned academic realist, he argues that in an anarchic world, great powers establish hegemony through raw capability, not moral tales. Neither pro-Russian, nor pro-Ukrainian, he has argued that Russia is not capable of conquering the whole of Ukraine, let alone attacking other European countries, and at the same time that Ukraine simply cannot win a war of attrition against Russia.

Pokrovsk’s fall proves his point. As Ukrainian units, cut off and exhausted, were being destroyed, or forced to surrender, in a game-changing move, Moscow opened the battlefield to journalists – Ukrainians included. Military defeat became global broadcast, notes Mearsheimer, who has warned for decades that NATO expansion would provoke exactly this war. To him Pokrovsk is the moment the West’s three-year illusion of “inevitable Ukrainian victory” collapses in broad daylight.

For months Western leaders and television generals had been speaking of turning points, counter-offensives and Russian collapse. Fiddlesticks. Slowly but consistently, the Russian war machine did what it does best: Adapt and grind on. Billions in weapons, endless sanctions, heroic speeches, none of it changed the basic numbers and facts.

Russia shifted to a patient war of attrition: Fortify, advance metre by metre, bleed the enemy dry. Its dogma relies on drones, heavy bombardment and small groups of soldiers occupying one small area at a time. Pokrovsk had to be taken because it sits on the main supply artery to the Donbas front. Once this artery is cut, no amount of Patriot missiles or F-16 promises can reopen it. Remember, Putin wants the whole of the Donetsk oblast and will not stop until he gets it.

But Putin also understands the propaganda value perfectly, Mearsheimer notes. By inviting the world’s cameras into the ruins, he forced the West to watch its own illusion die. He used the same trick at Mariupol’s Azovstal in 2022. Show the encircled enemy, show the destroyed equipment, show the faces of men who know the game is over. Once the pictures travel, European politicians cannot enforce their lies that easily. Rhetoric is faced with what is happening on the ground.

One needs to understand that Pokrovsk is more than a military disaster. The West sold this war as a moral crusade: Democracy against autocracy, good against evil. This packaging, however, ignored simple truths: Geography, logistics, manpower, industrial capacity. Sanctions did not cripple Russia. They crippled Europe’s industry. NATO training did not make Ukraine unbeatable – at best, it only prolonged the agony. By late 2025 the gap between battlefield facts and Brussels press conferences has become unbridgeable.

Europe now faces the bill. Gas prices remain 40 per cent above 2021 levels. Budgets are stretched. Public patience is gone, farmers block roads, voters punish governments. Hungary openly rejects the EU central policy, Slovakia follows suit, Eurosceptics are on the rise across the continent. Nonetheless, Germany, France, Ursula and Co insist on sanctions and war against Russia. At the same time, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio turns down the idea of further sanctioning Moscow, admitting that sanctions do not really work.

In this context, Pokrovsk is exactly the mirror the West refuses to look into. It shows a fragmented coalition that mistook moral sermons for strategy, narrative control for actual firepower and suffering for victory. Mearsheimer’s grim realism, which stresses that nations fight for power and survival, not for values, stands vindicated. To Moscow, an NATO-member Ukraine would be an existential threat. Now the town’s ruins are not just Ukraine’s graveyard. They are a grim monument to liberal hubris.

Rest assured there is plenty more where all this came from. The Russian war machine may have proven unable to swiftly neutralise the Ukrainian army and topple the country’s government, but has also exhibited an admirable adaptability to the new technological nature of contemporary warfare. If nothing dramatic happens, it is sure to keep advancing. For one more reason: While Putin passes new conscription laws, the Kievan Chief of Staff is simply running out of men.

So, this must be the awakening. From Kharkiv through Lugansk to Donetsk, and from Zaporizhzhia to Kherson, the Russians are either unmovable or advancing. To pretend the war in Ukraine can still be won on Western terms is no longer possible. Pokrovsk has spoken. The question left for Europe is brutal and simple: Will leaders and bigwigs finally acknowledge what is happening, or will they keep sacrificing lives in order to save face, all while undermining the EU itself?

Great powers caught in quagmires eventually reach a moment when they realise that a military campaign is a lost cause. The later this moment comes, the higher the cost. Blindness can thus become an existential threat. So the message to Europe is clear. If the EU keeps on fighting an unwinnable war, it risks implosion and disintegration. That simple.

And honestly, why do we need distinguished professors to tell us what is obvious?