The Ukraine proxy war has entered a phase where the West’s core assumptions no longer hold, and John Mearsheimer’s latest conversation with Glenn Diesen lays out why. Fresh from a trip to Russia, the University of Chicago professor reports that the sanctions regime has failed to break the country and that Moscow has shifted to a strategy of forcing Kyiv to its knees.

Speaking on Glenn Diesen’s channel on 17 September 2026, Mearsheimer described a Russia that is stable, functioning and confident. ‘The Russian economy is in quite good shape,’ he said, adding that he saw no evidence of trouble and met nobody who claimed otherwise. The only visible sign of sanctions he encountered were queues at petrol stations.

Walking the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, he found life ‘very normal’, cleaner and probably safer than Chicago or New York. ‘When you talk to people about the war, you didn’t have any sense that the war was interfering with their life in any meaningful way,’ he said, while noting that rural Russians are said to be more affected.

On the political front, Mearsheimer dismissed Western hopes of a palace coup. Dissatisfaction inside the security elite with Putin’s earlier restraint has ‘withered away’ since June, when the Russian president ‘took the gloves off’. ‘The Russians are determined to continue escalating until they bring Ukraine to its knees,’ he said.

He also warned that any successor to Putin would be worse for the West. ‘If Putin were to have a massive heart attack tomorrow and pass away, the person who would replace him in all likelihood would be a real hardliner,’ he said. ‘The idea that if Putin goes away and you get a new leader, that that leader is going to be more interested in accommodating the West — I think you’re living in a dream world.’

Diesen framed the NATO strategy of deep strikes inside Russia as self-defeating, because it treats the war as Russian opportunism rather than an existential threat. Mearsheimer agreed that pressure only pushes Moscow to become more ruthless.

On his dinner with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Mearsheimer said the conversation reinforced his prior view. ‘Lavrov is clearly a hardliner,’ he said, convinced that diplomacy with the West ‘is not going to go anywhere’. In Lavrov’s reading, Europeans and Ukrainians work hand in hand, using Ukraine as a ‘battering ram’ against Russia. The logical conclusion, Mearsheimer said, is a settlement that ‘greatly weakens Ukraine’ so it cannot restart the war.

Crucially, nobody he asked — including Lavrov — would define Russia’s endgame or the shape of the territorial settlement. ‘I think it’s in large part because they just don’t know,’ he said. What is certain, he added, is the outcome: ‘I did not meet a single person who didn’t believe that Russia would win.’

For Global South News, the interview matters because it punctures the Western narrative of a collapsing Russian economy and an inevitable Ukrainian victory. It confirms what much of the Global South has argued since 2022: sanctions have failed, NATO escalation is prolonging the war, and the only realistic path is a settlement that addresses Russia’s security concerns. The video is embedded above.