With all due respect to Mearsheimer, who I studied at Columbia's SIPA, he is 100 percent wrong here. This is the problem with trying to take IR theory and applying to Russia. I argued in my Master's thesis at SIPA in 1994 that everything, and I mean everything, that Russian leaders do externally is done to influence the domestic audience. Putin, feeling that his grip on the domestic situation was weakening due to bleak economic prospects, chose to invade Ukraine to create an external event that would eventually unify Russians around the "flag;" not the Russian flag, because patriotism is a genie Putin fears, but the compartmentalized patriotic acts like, for instance, fighting "fascism" in Ukraine--even though none there exists and the fascism is actually in Russia.