Trump-Vance is Putin's Dream Ticket

Russia Will Now Double Down on Trying to Steal the 2024 Election

While everyone is focused on polling data for the November 2024 elections, there are other numbers that may be even more important to its outcome. They are 100%, 1200, 350-500,000, $55 billion.

These numbers are the absolutely staggering losses Russia has suffered since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an escalation of a war they began there in 2014.  The 100% refers to the percentage of the total number of troops that Russia committed to the war at the outset who have been killed or wounded. The 1200 refers to the number of Russian troops killed or wounded each and every day. The 350,000-500,000 refers to the total number of Russian troops killed or wounded during the conflict—more, according to the Washington Post , than Russia has lost in all its other wars combined since 1945. The $55 billion is a conservative estimate of the financial cost of the war to Russia’s battered economy.  Russia has effectively run out of its stock of Soviet era equipment. Thousands of tanks and artillery pieces are gone. A substantial percentage of Russia’s airforce and Black Sea fleet have been obliterated. And the gains that Russia made earlier this year when Ukraine was hobbled by the Trump-MAGA-GOP interruption in aid to Kyiv have now been stopped. Russia is reeling and new weapons including F-16s, Patriot missile batteries and tanks are arriving.

Nearly “2 percent of all Russian men aged between 20 and 50 may have either been killed or severely wounded” since the invasion according to the Economist. In short, Russia is reeling.

The Ukraine war is Putin’s greatest gamble and it is not going well. He may be able to sustain the conflict for a considerable period. But with Western support for Ukraine it is certain the toll the war will take on Russia will continue to climb while the Russian military’s prospects for major gains do not look to improve at all.

The people of Russia are starting to feel these losses in their daily lives. Resentment is rising despite Putin’s iron grip in the state.  More than 1 million of Russia’s best and smartest citizens have fled the country.

There is only one chance for a Russian breakthrough. There is only one card Putin can play to turn the tide in Ukraine.

What should frighten Americans is that the benefits to Putin for playing that card have become considerably greater this week and that the card itself is dramatically less expensive to Putin than any of his military options even as it is much more likely to deliver not only the results he wants in Ukraine but also knock-on successes in his goal to expand Russia’s influence ever deeper into Europe.

The card, of course, is the Trump card. Putin and the world have long known that the reelection of Donald Trump is the one certain death blow to U.S. support for Ukraine, a blow so potent it would also dramatically weaken NATO and leave much of Europe’s Eastern flank open to further Russia aggression.

But with the addition of JD Vance to the Trump ticket it has become even more overtly pro-Putin. If anything, hard as it is to believe, Vance is even more pro-Russia than Trump. What is more with Vance, at age 39 on the ticket as the new heir apparent to the MAGA movement, were he and Trump to win, it is likely that Putin and his cronies could count on American support potentially for decades to come.

It is a stunning shift. What was once a fondness for the Kremlin that was a source of controversy during the first Trump term has now been solidified, institutionalized, baked-into-cake as a central—perhaps the central—distinguishing component of Trump-Vance-MAGA-Republican Party foreign policy.