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!

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........

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