Putin needs Trump's help more than ever
And Trump is signaling that he'll deliver.
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It’s been nearly three years since Vladimir Putin’s despotic regime began its reign of terror against Ukraine by attempting to conquer the country and, in Putin’s words, put an end to the “fictional” Ukrainian nation.
Putin’s gambit has failed, leaving Russia in economic and demographic crisis. The Russian dictator’s only hope is to receive help from his longstanding ally: Donald Trump. And he just might get it.
Last week, in the midst of the latest wave of Russian bombings of apartments and markets, a leading rightwing American influencer repeated Putin’s lie that the West forced Russia to invade its neighbor. According to this influencer, by leaving open the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO at some undefined date in the future, President Biden and other Western leaders forced Putin’s hand, compelling him to embark on a campaign mass murder and destruction.
“I could understand their feeling,” said the influencer, of the purportedly beleaguered Putinists.
That rightwing influencer was Donald Trump. (Watch below.)
Soon thereafter, Trump’s designated “Envoy for Ukraine and Russia,” Keith Kellogg, echoed the Trump/Kremlin line, stating that the US will pursue a resolution of Russia’s war of conquest that is “equitable and fair.” The implication was plain: Putin’s violent imperialist project is justified, and it’s only “fair” that he be appeased.
It’s clear that the incoming Trump administration is ready to reward Putin for invading his neighbor. Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor and self-described “warrior diplomat,” declared Sunday on ABC that there’s been a "huge step forward" because the "rest of the world" is coming around to the Putin/Trump view that a "ceasefire" should be imposed leaving Putin with a large swath of Ukrainian territory.
"I just don't think it's realistic to say we're gonna expel every Russian from every inch of Ukrainian soil,” Waltz said. “Even Crimea." (Watch below.)
Russia currently occupies only about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory after three years of combat that has cost approximately 800,000 Russian casualties. The battle lines are moving very slowly, despite Putin sacrificing large numbers of soldiers every day. And in the meantime, Russia’s war economy is collapsing in a mire of stagnation and inflation.
Yet, based on the statements of Trump and his courtiers, it seems that the incoming president is determined to throw Putin a lifeline. The consequences of this traitorous prospect for the United States and Europe, let alone Ukraine, would be catastrophic.
Putin’s debacle
In February 2022, at the outset of his full scale onslaught on Ukraine, Putin predicted that his invading army would be welcomed and would prevail in a matter of days, much as did the Soviet Union’s invading army in Eastern Poland in 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. Instead, Putin’s invading forces met fierce resistance from a nation that had already endured and fought back against years of Russian-sponsored attacks.
As the outset of the full-scale invasion, in a humiliating display, miles-long convoys of Russian invading armies were stopped on roads and destroyed in place, most far from their targets in Kyiv and elsewhere in Western Ukraine. Furthermore, after Russian invaders were expelled from towns such as Bucha, evidence of rapes and mass killings demonstrated the utter debasement and brutality of the Putin regime’s military. Their atrocities resembled the behavior of the German troops on the Eastern Front of World War II — a dark irony given Putin’s claim that Russia invaded to free Ukraine from “Nazis.”
In addition to being unprepared for the steely opposition of the Ukrainians, Putin was caught off guard by the effective support that the West, under the leadership of President Joe Biden, marshaled on behalf of Ukraine. Biden and his team demonstrated that they had learned important lessons from less effective responses to Putin’s prior incursions into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
Before the invasion began, the Biden administration took the unprecedented step of publicly disclosing that Putin was amassing troops on Ukraine’s border. Biden began pressuring European nations to stand behind Ukraine, despite the reticence of some politicians in “leading” nations like Germany and France. Soon, European countries were providing military support for Ukraine. Nearly as importantly, Europe started weaning itself from reliance on Russian natural gas, which Putin had long used as a political and economic drug to hook countries like Germany.
Biden took a well-deserved victory lap on Monday for his strategy of supporting Ukraine and stymying Putin, noting during his foreign policy farewell speech that “when Putin invaded Ukraine, he thought he'd conquer Kyiv in a matter of days. But the truth is, since that war began, I'm the only one that stood in the center of Kyiv, not him. Putin never has." (Watch below.)
Putin’s war of conquest has been disastrous for the people of Ukraine, who have had to defer their efforts to build a democracy and functioning economy in order to fend off an onslaught from one of the largest militaries in the world — one that honed its brutal tactics through years of bombarding Syrian and Chechen civilians. But the Ukrainian military, with US and European support in the form of weapons, not only fended off Russia’s attacks on Western Ukraine, but had initial success pushing invaders out of key parts of the East of the country. While a Ukrainian offensive in 2023 largely failed, the country has managed to limit Russian gains.
Some Ukrainian resources, however, may be near their breaking point. The government has been reticent to conscript young people, for good reason, given the nation’s history of devastation, and Ukraine is quite literally running out of troops. On large portions of the massive front, the country has only a small infantry presence. And this state of affairs has allowed Russia to make ongoing gains of territory during recent months, even as Putin’s forces destroy apartment blocks, hospitals, and schools in Ukraine’s cities and towns.
But the cost to Russia of Putin’s continued pursuit of his nihilistic war may be nearly as grievous.
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Despite its far smaller fighting force, Ukraine has demonstrated the ability to marshal often far superior Western weapons systems as well its own weapons, most notably “kamikaze” drones, allowing the country to slow Russia’s encroachment and impose a massive cost on the invaders. Russia has already suffered approximately 800,000 casualties and the current estimated average rate of Russian troop losses is about 1,400 a day. In addition to holding onto territory in Russia’s Kursk region, Ukraine has also recently had success in striking strategic targets in Russia.
Apparently out of fear of the potential political costs, Putin has been unwilling to impose a new mandatory mobilization. The Russian dictator also refuses to admit to his subjects that Russia is involved in a war at all. It’s illegal in Russia to describe Putin’s war of conquest for what it is; instead, it must be called a “Special Military Operation.”
But Russia is nonetheless continuing to send huge portions of its population into a maw of death in Ukraine, including by emptying prisons and enticing men from the poorest (often non-Russian speaking) areas of the country to join the military. And North Korean troops have recently started fighting alongside Russians.
The decaying pariah state
The costs in maimed and dead Russians are far from the only price Russia is paying for Putin’s war. In just a few years, the already grievously weakened country’s economy and key cohorts of its population have been depleted by the huge direct and indirect costs of the war on Ukraine (as well as the now entirely failed war on Syria). The country’s remaining democratic institutions have been systematically dismantled, while many of Russia’s most skilled (and valuable) professionals have fled.
After years of attempting to make Russia a “normal” country that is integrated with its neighbors and the world, Putin has now been fully transformed his country into an international pariah state whose primary allies are fellow kleptocracies and autocracies, including Iran and North Korea, as well as Xi’s China and various terrorist groups.
These allies are far from charitably minded. Xi’s price for tacitly supporting Russia’s war of terror has been to make Russia into what amounts to a vassal client of China, which is increasingly treating Russia as its captive source of cheap oil. And Ukraine’s recent decision to cease permitting Russia to transit gas through a Ukrainian pipeline to its remaining few customers in Europe means the country is now going to have to sell even more of its hydrocarbons at low prices to China.
Russia’s economic travails are, inevitably, contributing to the military ones. The Russian military-industrial sector remains hobbled by corrosive and rampant corruption and labor shortages. This has been made evident, most embarrassingly, by the underperformance of many of Russia’s weapons systems on the Ukrainian battlefields, in some cases because the systems were not maintained for decades as military funding was siphoned off by criminals.
As a result, Russia is running out of some critical items, such as tanks, and has shown an impaired ability to replenish stocks of armored vehicles. And longstanding customers of Russian weapons, including India, are less interested in buying weapons systems from Putin given how badly many of them have performed on the battlefield in Ukraine. This bodes ill for one of Russia’s other key sources of hard currency.
While Stalin’s Russia, with help from massive aid and materiel from the United States, was able to supercharge its military with ever increasing numbers of weapons during World War II, today’s Russia — which was already becoming a husk of a nation well before 2022 — has no such ability.
The lynchpin moment is approaching
By the estimates of many analysts, the Russian economy, which is mired in stagflation, is on the verge of collapse. As a result, if the war on Ukraine proceeds on anything close to the current pace, Russia’s battered military and economic infrastructure could begin collapsing within a year — maybe faster if Trump actually makes good on his promise to flood the markets with oil and gas, thereby further lowering market prices.
Such a Russian collapse would plainly be in the interest not only of Ukraine, but also of Europe, the United States, and every other democratic nation. This is because, even as Putin has been pursuing his kinetic war against Ukraine, he has continued to avidly pursue what’s been dubbed a “hybrid” war on Western and other democracies, including schemes to undermine elections and otherwise foster cultural and political division.
This scheme has been distressingly successful not only in the United States, but also in numerous European countries. Nations including Germany, Austria, and Romania may be poised to elect more pro-Russian governments, supplementing pro-Russian leaders in Hungary and Slovakia. Furthermore, Putin, who has a history of engaging in wars of aggression against other nations in addition to Ukraine, almost certainly intends to start hot wars to retake territory in nations that are currently part of NATO if given the chance. Potential targets include Poland and Lithuania, if Putin succeeds in cracking up NATO — as Trump seems determined to help him accomplish, including by threatening or otherwise subverting NATO allies like Denmark and Canada.
Trump’s threats of conflict with NATO members that the US has a treaty obligation to defend are likely just feints, at least at the moment. But the impact of such threats on the war against Ukraine could be immediate. Nothing could better serve Putin’s goal of gaining international approval for a Munich-like slicing up of Ukraine than a US president threatening to conquer countries himself.
Trump’s “peace” initiative
For months, Trump promised to end Russia’s war on Ukraine immediately upon entering the White House (or even before). Like many of his promises, that will not be fulfilled. Instead of ending the war, Trump’s team now seems focused on compelling a ceasefire.
Depending on the terms of such a cessation of hostilities, the prospect might not be entirely good news for Putin. While a lull in the fighting would allow Russia to regroup, it could also permit Ukraine to reinforce its defenses and train its forces. Accordingly, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy has signaled that Ukraine could potentially support a ceasefire that is backed up by peacekeepers who stand at the truce line to prevent Russia from attacking again.
Unsurprisingly, however, the Putin regime has loudly signaled that it will not tolerate a ceasefire that actually prevents Putin from recommencing the war upon his whim. In other words, only a sham ceasefire is acceptable to the Tsar.
In addition to retaining leeway to recommence the battle at any time, Putin is determined to obtain international recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the other Ukrainian territory Russia currently occupies — something Kellogg and Waltz are signaling Trump is more than open to.
The political and geopolitical consequence of granting legitimacy to Putin’s conquering of portions of Ukraine could be disastrous. That’s true not only for Ukraine, but also for the democratic states of Europe, the Americas, and the rest of the world, virtually all of which are current or prospective targets of Russia’s hybrid warfare, and some of which could relatively soon become targets of kinetic attacks by Russia.
Trump appears intent on continuing his project of reorienting US foreign policy in opposition to our longtime democratic allies and in support of dictators and authoritarians. He and his cronies are signaling that he’s just as willing to do Putin’s bidding now as he was during his first term, when he was impeached for not following through on US commitments to Ukraine.
Accordingly, the critical upcoming test for our nation will be whether we allow Trump to get away with saving the Putin regime from defeat in Ukraine, and with providing the Russian dictator with a new nascent empire from which to continue expand his imperialist project westward.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Trump is a traitor to the United States. Russia is waging war on the US every day in terms of attacking our infrastructure, and sowing disinformation. To ally with an enemy who will continue to attack us defies belief. I have been saying from day one, Project 2025, and the incoming administration are a formula for turning the US into a third world country.
Things will not be improved with Elon Musk owning TikTok to have 2 platforms to sow disinformation and destroy democracy.
After decades of self-interested, myopic, and hubristic wars, it's hard to support US military intervention anywhere. But if there has been anything close to a just war in our time, the Ukrainian struggle to shape their own national trajectory rather than bow to Russia seems to qualify. We made a decent if imperfect start. Naturally, Trump promises betrayal ...