I’ve always believed that obtaining control of the city and the port of Odessa is central to ending the Russia’s war against Kiev and Clown World. This recent conversation between John Mearsheimer and Sergei Larvrov in Moscow, as reported by Larry Johnson, tends to confirm that:
A week ago Monday I had dinner with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. I was in the company of John Mearsheimer, Judge Andrew Napolitano, and Alastair Crooke. The dinner was informal and genuinely candid, and Lavrov answered questions directly — and anyone who has sat with Mearsheimer knows he does not ask soft ones. I came away with two clear impressions.
The first is that Russia’s negotiating position toward the West has not moved an inch since Putin addressed his foreign ministry on June 14, 2024. In that speech he made the terms explicit, and they are the terms still on the table: the West must recognize Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, along with Crimea, as permanent Russian territory. These former Ukrainian oblasts are not going back. In Moscow that is treated not as an opening bid but as a settled fact. Beyond it, Russia is building buffer zones through its advances in Sumy, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk. Those territories could, in time, be incorporated as well — though officials frame that as something that would follow a vote or plebiscite rather than a foregone conclusion. It is not formally on the menu. But it is, in my read, very much in the cards.
The second impression is that the space for a negotiated settlement is extremely narrow — narrower than Western capitals want to admit — because Russia is simply not willing to make the concessions the West requires, and does not believe it has to. My own assessment, after listening to how officials here talk, is that the war effort will not stop until Odessa and Kyiv are firmly under Russian control. I hold that as a judgment, not a certainty. But nothing I heard this week moved me off it.
I’ll disagree with Larry about Kiev. I don’t believe Russia wants it, and the rump state of Western Ukraine will need a capital city. But Odessa is too important economically to not take control of it.