The South China Morning Post reports on an interview with realist academic John Mearsheimer:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3330356/john-j-mearsheimer-unavoidable-anarchy-and-what-trump-gets-right-china-russia]

To make a democracy work you need tolerance. Tolerance is of enormous importance because people
often disagree about core issues like abortion. There is not much tolerance of opposing viewpoints these
days.

People on the red side view people on the blue side as the enemy and people on the blue side view people
on the red side as the enemy.

When you live in a liberal democracy and you have division of this sort where you have rival groups that
don’t just disagree but loathe each other, and in many cases want to do violence to the other side, and
certainly show very little tolerance towards the other side, that liberal democracy is not going to last
very long.

The thing you want to remember is that in any political system, whether you are talking about China or
the United States or any other country, different people are going to have fundamentally different views
about first principles and about questions regarding the good life.

They are going to want to run their lives in very different ways. You always have fundamental
differences among groups of people and among individuals in any society. To make that society work,
you need a powerful government that can keep people from killing each other.

Which is exactly why Ukraine does not have a liberal democracy because it lacks this essential quality - tolerance.

That lack of tolerance, once fully triggered by a power shift after the Maidan coup, resulted in intolerant nationalists branding those who did not agree with their views first 'separatists' and then 'terrorists' and then other kinds of vermin that needed to be eradicated.

This is not a liberal democracy in action. And it never was.

Liberal Western democracies are highly intolerant of intolerant nationalists in their own countries but apparently highly tolerant and supportive of intolerant nationalists if they are in Ukraine.

And in this interview Mearsheimer re-iterates his long-term position on the conflict in Ukraine:

It was remarkably foolish of the United States and the Europeans to push to bring Ukraine into Nato.

And that is why I’ve argued that the United States especially, but also the Europeans, bear the principal
responsibility for this disaster. If the West had not moved to bring Ukraine into Nato, I believe that
Ukraine would exist today inside its pre-2014 borders.

That is to say that I believe Crimea and the four oblasts that Russia has annexed would still be part of
Ukraine. There would have been no war in all likelihood between Ukraine and Russia. It was a colossal
mistake on the part of the US and its European allies to push to bring Ukraine into Nato.

Think on't as Councillor Duxbury would say.