Photo by Brad Ritson

As best I can tell, Vladimir Putin is playing a dead man’s hand with his endless rounds of Go Fish in Ukraine with Trump lackeys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (negotiators to the stars).

Most accounts of the recent talks to end the war in Ukraine assume that Putin holds all the cards marked with war or peace. He’s the tough guy rolling up eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and any day now will expand his wars across the NATO frontier.

Hence the Trump envoys arriving on bended knee to the Finland Station—to shower the Soviet oligarchy with more gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

In turn, Trump thinks that deals with Putin can roll back the price of diesel and gasoline to $3 a gallon, end runaway inflation, obscure the self-inflicted wounds in Gaza and Iran, and save him from electoral humiliation in the U.S. midterm elections.

But Putin (not unlike Trump) is only playing weak hands. As Henry Gondorff says to another loser in The Sting: “Don’t worry about it, pal. They wouldn’t have let you in here if you weren’t a chump!

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Let’s look at Putin through Russian eyes. In sending wave after wave of untrained soldiers over the top into Ukraine, Putin is killing and wounding some 5,000 Russian soldiers per week, casualties of World War I proportions.

To beef up his suicide squads, he has had to deploy a few North Korean legions, and soon he will have to implement a general draft.

Total Russian casualties in the Ukraine war now exceed 1.5 million. Keep in mind that the toll of 50,000 Russian casualties in Afghanistan 1979-89 contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Since the war began in Ukraine in 2022, Putin has also lost some 12,000 tanks, including a few that he retrieved from Russian military museums and dispatched into Ukrainian trenches. Putin’s artillery losses are more than 50,000. Is this the army that can attack NATO along the line from Finland to Turkey?

Economically, Putin is down to his last call option, which is to cash in some sanction relief from his Manchurian candidate, who recently obliged his Russian paymasters by lifting the Western (i.e., Graham) embargo on Russian oil exports. But having petroleum reserves does not maketh a superpower—just ask the Nigerians, Iraqis, and Venezuelans.

Politically, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has turned Russia into a Chinese client state, dependent on Beijing to launder its blood money and supply replacement weapons. It has also placed Putin high up in the Trump-Netanyahu Cling-to-Power Club. (Motto: “Unless you’re in power, you’re in jail.”)

Hence his last rolls of the dice with the Atlantic City croupier, Donald J. Trump.

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That Putin thinks Trump is a functional world leader is another Russian illusion. You might have assumed that Putin’s red carpet car ride around the Anchorage airport would have clued him up on Donny’s madness, but as Putin lives in the same bomb-sheltered bubble as his talking dummy, maybe he didn’t get the word.

Putin continues to believe that Witkoff, and Kushner can deliver him all of Ukraine, much of Eastern Europe, a throne to some imaginary Middle Kingdom, and maybe a few more super yachts—without seeming to realize that Trump’s only in the negotiating game to siphon off a few more billion in $Trump meme coins and maybe come away with a golf resort in Donetsk.

If Putin really wanted to negotiate with those in power, he would be on the phone with those 17-year-old Ukrainians piloting drones into Russian refineries.

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Putin’s other gamble—although his odds are the same as those in roulette—is to bet on the coming destruction of NATO and the European Union.

One of Putin’s popular baccarat plays is the hope that a Marine Le Pen presidency in France (perhaps encouraged by a few Molotov cocktails thrown into the current wave of street demonstrations?) will end European support for Ukraine and even put paid to the common market.

Le Pen has promised to end French support for Ukraine within six months of her election in 2027. If it happened, it would be a blow to the European coalition supporting President Zelensky but not fatal.

Another possibility is that even a phalanx of right-wing Western European governments might prove more anti-Russian than a coalition of the bed-wetting left.

No matter who wins looming European elections, one thing is sure: it will take at least several generations for Russia to be welcomed back into European affairs, and Moscow can thank the bumbling, if brutal, Putin for that isolation.

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One of the reasons that Donald Trump rushed his private negotiator Witkoff to St. Petersburg is that he believed Putin might save his bacon in the forthcoming wipeout in the midterm elections.

Keep in mind that the Russians have been “bery bery good” to Trump in past elections.

Although Trump seems to have given up on ending the war he alone started in Iran, he clings to the illusion that Ukraine is responsible for the high price of diesel and consumer inflation—and that with a little help from his buddy Vlad he can avoid defeat in all those swing districts and states.

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What Trump and Putin are missing in their slow dance is that come November 4, Trump becomes a dead man golfing, and the entire MAGA movement will take on the look of Kremlin fellow travelers.

As of November 5, the leading issue in the 2028 presidential election will be the question: “Who sold the American government to the Russians?” And for the first time in history, the Democrats can run on an anti-Russian, Cold War platform.

All the Democratic House will need to do is subpoena the investment accounts of Witkoff and Kushner, and it will be apparent to all but the dimmest voter and maybe JD Vance that Trump’s presidency has been little more than an in-the-money option for Putin’s SUV union.