Thank the Republicans – even Donald Trump – for Putin’s very bad week

Opinion

By means of Johannes Herbst

Thanks to the statesmanship of Chairman Mike Johnson, Russian President Vladimir Putin has had a very bad week.

The House of Representatives passed a $60.84 billion aid package for Ukraine on Saturday.

The Senate passed it on Tuesday and the president signed it into law on Wednesday.

Weapons from the package are already arriving in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has closely followed and celebrated the nearly seven-month delay in US aid.

The reason is easy to understand. As Putin himself made clear in the respectful February interview with Tucker Carlson, if the United States stopped sending weapons, the war would be over “within weeks.”

While Putin’s time frame is an exaggeration, it is true that without substantial U.S. military assistance, Ukraine cannot stop Russian aggression and the Kremlin could win.

Weeks after the aid package failed to pass in September, Ukrainian forces began rationing their use of ammunition, the main reason why the Russians continued to make gains on the battlefield, including capturing Avdiivka and closing in on the city of Khasiv Yar.

With American weapons arriving, Kiev can stop rationing ammunition, and Moscow’s position near Khasiv Yar could prove to be the pinnacle of its current offensive.

And the legislation’s call for closer oversight of aid appears to have convinced the administration to do something it should have done sooner: enlist the Office of Defense Cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine to help with anything involving military aid has to do with.

This is a welcome measure to regularize and control our military aid to Ukraine, which is absolutely essential to ensure that Putin loses this war.

That’s not the end of Putin’s bad week.

The passed package of bills included the REPO Act, which gives the president the authority to transfer frozen Russian state assets in the United States to Ukraine to compensate for the estimated $500 billion in damage caused there by the Kremlin’s aggression caused.

Although it is widely believed that there are only $5 billion in Russian assets here, much larger sums of US dollars are held by US financial institutions in the correspondent accounts of foreign depository banks such as Belgium’s Euroclear.

Such ties confer U.S. jurisdiction, as many international banks recently discovered in sanctions evasion and money laundering cases.

Strong American leadership in this area – not a given, but a step in the right direction – could convince the other G7 countries to take action.

Canada and Great Britain are already interested in this.

This has caused great concern in Moscow and apparently also among some American politicians, such as Senator Mike Lee and JD Vance, who are inexplicably criticizing the attempt to make Russia pay for the great destruction it has wrought in Ukraine.

Perhaps most surprising in the Kremlin’s hellish week was Donald Trump’s April 18 post, in which he noted that Ukraine’s survival is important to America.

Moscow is banking on the prospect that Trump will win the election and continue the weak policies toward Russia and Ukraine advocated by some of his loudest supporters, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Vance.

Perhaps Moscow forgot that Trump, unlike Barack Obama, sent anti-tank spears to Ukraine.

Perhaps it would not have been noticed that Trump, unlike those naive politicians, has not spoken out against aid to Ukraine since last fall.

In any case, this gives Moscow good reason to wonder whether its elaborate plan to promote isolationism and political struggle in America will bear fruit.

This development could also add to Moscow’s woes, as it gives the White House a political reason to pursue a bolder policy in Ukraine.

Over the past two years, the Biden team, deterred by the Kremlin’s threats of nuclear escalation, has been consistently slow to get Ukraine the weapons it needs — the main reason for the small gains from last year’s Ukrainian land counteroffensive .

Biden must now take into account the possibility that Trump will call him out on this.

It would indeed be smart politics if Trump were to find his inner Ronald Reagan – recent polls show that a majority of 60% of voters in swing districts favor strong US support for Ukraine.

John Herbst is director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine under George W. Bush.