Michael Reagan: Putin takes advantage of weakness

Goodbye, Ukraine.

That poor, corrupt and undemocratic Eastern European country is in the process of being beaten into submission and conquered by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

It should surprise no one. Putin has been telling us for months, and showing us for weeks by encircling Ukraine with 150,000 Russian soldiers, what he was going to do. Now Putin's doing it – and there's nothing we can do about it.

This is the kind of stuff that happens when there is a weak leader in the White House.

The invasion of eastern Ukraine proves that of the two countries, the United States and Russia, only one has a strong leader – and it's not the U.S. Returning all or part of Ukraine and its 42 million people to Russian control is a part of Putin's decades-old dream of rebuilding as much as he could of the former Soviet Empire before he's dead.

Two American presidents – Obama and now Biden – have done their best to make Putin's dream a reality. When Putin bit off Crimea from the territory of Ukraine in 2014 the Obama administration did virtually nothing.

Now it looks like if he feels like it, he might decide to just swallow up the whole country, which is 78 percent ethnic Ukrainian and 17 percent Russian.

The "KGB Thug" has played a high-stakes geopolitical poker game with Biden while the world watched – and he won by default. It's too late now for the weak and inept Biden administration to do anything but hold press conferences and complain.

Imposing strict financial sanctions on Russia next week will not make Putin pull out his tanks and soldiers. We're not going to go to thermonuclear war with Russia over the sovereignty of Ukraine, nor should we. And the spineless European Union isn't going to be anything more than a spectator to a Russian land grab that has been inevitable for more than a decade.

Ukraine may prove to be too big, too poor and too full of Ukrainians willing to fight and die in a guerrilla war for Russia's feeble economy to digest in the long run. But for now, thanks to the Biden administration's one-two punch of weakness and incompetence, Ukraine is now Putin's to do with what he wants.

He's been waiting for a weakling like Biden to occupy the White House and he has not let the opportunity pass him by. He's 73. He knows he's personally running out of time to "Make Russia Great Again." He also knew that he had only a four-year window to make his dream a reality.

He had to "MRGA" before Biden – or his inevitable successor, the even more clueless Kamala Harris – was replaced by a competent president with a spine. The fact is, no matter what you think of Donald Trump – and people know I don't think very highly of him – the invasion of Ukraine would have never happened under Trump and certainly not under Ronald Reagan.