Thank Republicans even Donald Trump for Putins very bad week

Thanks to the statesmanship of Speaker Mike Johnson, Russian President Vladimir Putin has suffered a very bad week.The House of Representatives passed Saturday a $60.84 billion aid package for Ukraine.

The Senate passed it Tuesday, and Wednesday the president signed it into law.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 Tucker Carlson’s deferential February interview, if the United States stopped sending weapons, the war would be over “in weeks.” While Putin’s timeframe is hyperbole, it is true that without substantial American military aid, Ukraine cannot stop Russian aggression and the Kremlin could win.Weeks after the September failure to pass the aid package, Ukrainian forces started to ration their use of ordnance, the main reason the Russians made incremental gains on the battlefield including taking Avdiivka and now closing in on the town of Chasiv Yar.

With American arms starting to arrive, Kyiv can stop rationing ammunition, and Moscow’s position short of Chasiv Yar may prove to be the high-water mark of its current offensive.And the legislation’s call for closer oversight on aid appears to have persuaded the administration to do something it should have done earlier — plus-up the US embassy’s Office of Defense Cooperation in Ukraine to help with all things military-aid related.This is a welcome measure to regularize and oversee our military aid to Ukraine, which is absolutely essential to ensure Putin loses this war.That is not the end of Putin’s bad week.

The package of bills passed 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 Kremlin aggression has caused there.While it’s widely believed there are only $5 billion of such Rus...