a Western bulwark on Russia’s border... NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat." Mearsheimer says Ukraine's political leeway is determined by how it manages to strike a balance between Western orientation and consideration for Russian security interests. Mearsheimer does not deny Russia's aggression in this regard, but his criticism is directed at EU and NATO. "Given the West's talk about eventual NATO membership and association agreements with the EU, how were politicians in Ukraine to resist the appeal of eventual inclusion? But if they succumb to that temptation they put themselves at risk of Russia’s wrath." In a subsequent interview in November 2022 to the same New Yorker journalist, Mearsheimer argued that since the beginning of the conflict Russia has not been interested in the occupation of Ukraine, but only in the annexation of its south-eastern territories (the oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk). The main proof of this would be the fact that if Putin had really intended to occupy the entire territory of Ukraine, he would not have used an army consisting of only 190,000 soldiers. The bombings on Kyiv had and have the sole purpose of inducing the Ukrainian government and its western allies to accept the recognition of the annexation to Russia of the four aforementioned territories. In an interview with C-SPAN in late March 2022, Mearsheimer has stated that he considers American involvement with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to be secondary in terms of geopolitical priorities to immediate concerns which he associates with the containment of threats to geopolitical stability being caused by contemporary Chinese geopolitics, which Mearsheimer considers as a more immediate threat to geopolitical concerns in the United States. Mearsheimer debated the Russian invasion with Polish MP Radoslaw Sikorski in May 2022. Sikorski identified Putin as the culprit in conducting the invasion of Ukraine while Mearsheimer argued that Putin is pursuing a realist geopolitical plan to secure Russian national interests in the presence of perceived threats from an expanding NATO. Hypothesis testing in international relations In 2013, Mearsheimer and Walt published "Leaving theory behind: Why simplistic hypothesis testing is bad for International Relations." They point out that in recent years, scholars of international relations have devoted less effort to creating and refining