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Russian President Vladimir Putin had a very merry Christmas.
That is if you believe murdering Ukrainian civilians is a way to spend a holy day.
Five more were killed Christmas Day.
Boxing Day was no different. In Kharkiv, two people were killed and three more injured. One of the badly wounded — only hours after celebrating her first Yuletide — was a 9-month-old girl.
Putin has now murdered more than 677 Ukrainian children and wounded another 2,310, per Ukraine’s prosecutor-general office.
Need perspective? That’s the equivalent of six-plus average American elementary schools.
“Peace on earth, good will to men” is wholly irrelevant to Putin. Not toward men or children.
He’s not after peace. Rather, he is out for every piece of Ukraine.
Sunday’s 3 p.m. peace talks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are, perhaps, the last best chance to craft a peace settlement before the war enters a fifth year.
Zelensky is certainly trying. On Christmas Eve, in a significant shift, he signaled his willingness to Team Trump to cede Ukrainian territory — temporarily, not permanently — to create a demilitarized zone in Donbas.
Putin, of course, wants more. He just doesn’t have the military power to take it all by force.
That leaves him, as the Institute for the Study of War notes, far short of the necessary “manpower or materiel” to militarily “conquer the remainder of Donetsk.”
Instead, Mad Vlad is demanding the United States gift him the unoccupied parts of the Ukrainian oblast at the negotiating table.
Trump should just say no. Or more to the point, “Nyet!”
Especially since Zelensky courtesy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine just gave Trump a valuable negotiating card to play in Moscow.
Ukraine, in a stunning Christmas Day gift of coal to Putin, fully recaptured the strategic railway hub of Kupyansk in eastern Ukraine.
It was, as The Post reported, a humiliating “and staggering setback for the Kremlin.”
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. We just didn’t know he’s Ukrainian and Rudolph was lighting up the way in Kupyansk.
Putin should take heed. He has lost more than 1,202,070 dead or wounded chasing his faltering “special military operation in Ukraine.”
That’s the largest number of casualties by any army since World War II.
And for what of late? Since Jan. 1, Russia has only managed to capture 4,669 square kilometers or 0.77% of Ukrainian territory, according to the ISW.
Over that same time span, the Kremlin has suffered 391,270 casualties “or about 83 casualties per square kilometer.”
To put it in perspective, 1.2 million children were born in Russia during 2024.
Given the war in Ukraine, that number is likely to keep compounding downward.
Putin isn’t just killing and wounding his soldiers in Ukraine. He’s decimating would-be fathers and the future of his country as well.
Trump does hold most of the cards.
For Ukraine, the most important card he holds is the golden one that will determine what security guarantees Washington provides Kyiv to prevent Russia postwar from invading Ukraine again.
It’s highly encouraging Zelensky believes he’s reached agreement with the White House on US security guarantees.
Especially given the past failures of the Budapest and Minsk security guarantees that failed to stop Putin from seizing Crimea in 2014 and re-invading Ukraine in February 2022.
The president appears optimistic too. Late Friday, Trump told The Post in a telephone call that he feels there is a “good shot” at getting a peace deal done.
Trump’s key to making that happen is to play all his cards against Putin.
Stuff Ukraine’s stockings with Tomahawks, ammo and whatever else is needed to change Putin’s cost calculus. Moscow is out of cards.
Mad Vlad blindly sees himself as a would-be modern-day Peter the Great. Ditto the equal of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Team Trump should remind Putin that during World War II, Stalin’s armies marched 1,000 miles from Moscow to Berlin in four years of war.
Putin’s? On average he has managed over four years to advance 63 miles eastward from Donbas and northward from the Crimean Peninsula.
Hannibal he is not. Ditto Stalin or Peter the Great.
Putin, however, still gets a vote. He is likely to reject Trump’s latest efforts believing the president will cave to more Russian demands.
Doing so would be a mistake.
This Noël, Ukrainians celebrated like the Whoville Whos in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”
But these Ukrainian Whos fight back, and Putin — Grinch or not — is not going to defeat them.
Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the US European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014. They are the co-founders of INTREP360 and the INTREP360 Intelligence Report on Substack.