Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy said in a press conference shared last week that the United States would have to send its sons and daughters to die for NATO if Ukraine loses the war.
"The U.S. is never going to give up on the NATO member states," Zelenskyy said. "If it happens so that Ukraine, due to various opinions and weakening or depleting of assistance, loses, Russia is going to enter Baltic states — NATO member states — and then the U.S. will have to send their sons and daughters exactly the same way as we are sending our sons and daughters to war. And they will have to fight because it's NATO that we're talking about, and they will be dying. God forbid, because it's a horrible thing."
Ukraine itself is not a member of NATO. And according to University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, Russia has shown interest only in bulwarking against NATO's eastward expansion — not in invading NATO countries.
During an interview with CRUX about the Russia-Ukraine war, Mearsheimer said that Russian President Vladimir "Putin thinks what is going on in Ukraine, with regard to Ukraine's moving toward joining NATO, moving toward joining the [European Union], and cozying up with the West, is just unacceptable from a Russian security point of view.
"And [Putin] is determined to either turn Ukraine into a neutral state and if he can't do that, turn it into a dysfunctional rump state. And if you look at what is happening now, he is, in effect, turning it into a dysfunctional rump state."