said, is to soberly factor in Russia's security interests, like those of any other power. Ukraine, he said, must accept the role of buffer or bridge given to it by its geostrategic situation. Anything else, he said, was abstract and meaningless in terms of Realpolitik. The West's constructive cooperation with Russia is of great importance for solving important existing and upcoming problems and should not be put at risk, he said. In response to the Brookings Institution's 2015 recommendation to provide weapons to Ukraine to increase the cost of an attack to Putin, Mearsheimer replied in the New York Times that the strategic importance is so great to Russia that it will continue the conflict at any cost, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul counterargued in his Foreign Affairs response piece, that in 2014, Russian foreign policy was not a reaction to the United States, but was based on the internal Russian dynamics. 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine In his 25 September 2015 lecture "Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?", Mearsheimer stated that the West (the United States and the European Union) was leading Ukraine down the primrose path, that the Western powers were encouraging Ukraine to become part of the West despite their hesitancy to integrate Ukraine into NATO and the EU, that they were encouraging the Ukrainian government to pursue a hardline policy towards Russia, and that "the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked." In the same lecture Mearsheimer declared: "If you really want to wreck Russia, what you should do is to encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine. Putin is much too smart to try that." Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mearsheimer reiterated that NATO and the EU were largely to blame for the war in Ukraine. In an interview with the New Yorker, Mearsheimer stated: "I think all the trouble in this case really started in April 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine