Noting that Vladimir Putin turned 71 on Saturday, some Kremlin propagandists are calling the Hamas attack on Israel “a birthday present for President Putin.” They predict this gift will distract Americans from Ukraine and erode support for military aid to Kyiv.

“This mess is beneficial for Russia, because the globalist toad will be distracted from Ukraine and will get busy trying to put out the eternal Middle Eastern fire,” a Russian nationalist TV host, Sergey Mardan, wrote on his Telegram channel. “Iran is our real military ally. Israel is an ally of the United States. Therefore, choosing a side is easy!”

The former president, Dmitry Medvedev, said: “Instead of actively working at Palestinian-Israeli settlement, these morons [the Americans] have interfered with us, and are providing the neo-Nazis [the Ukrainians] with full-scale aid, pitting the two closely related peoples against each other.”

A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, predicts that Washington will cut funding: “The process of pumping the Kyiv regime with weapons from a factual, emotional, financial, technological point of view will enter a downward trend.”

Mr. Putin’s former advisor Sergei Markov says: “Any conflicts on which the US and the EU have to expend resources are beneficial for Russia because this lessens the resources sent to the Russophobic regime in Ukraine.”

While there is no indication that the Kremlin had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote on Saturday afternoon: “The Kremlin is already and will likely continue to exploit the Hamas attacks in Israel to advance several information operations intended to reduce US and Western support and attention to Ukraine…These Kremlin narratives target Western audiences to drive a wedge in military support for Ukraine.”

With Washington’s attention radically re-focused on Israel, defenders of Ukraine fear that American aid to Kyiv indeed is at risk. Since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine 20 months ago, America has provided $66 billion in aid to Ukraine, almost eight times the $8.6 billion provided to Israel during the same time. America and the European Union have economies of almost the same size — about $26 trillion — but America has supplied twice as much aid.

Defenders of aid to Ukraine say the assistance largely pays for itself. On the geopolitical front, a defeated Ukraine would mean millions of refugees permanently settling in the European Union, and Russian troops on NATO’s eastern border. It would be a green light for Communist China to attack the Republic of China on Taiwan, a potentially far more costly battle for the United States.

Most of the $43 billion in American military aid to Ukraine came from stockpiles of second generation U.S. military equipment. This old American-made equipment is being replaced with new American-made equipment. With the exception of military training in Europe, most of America’s military aid is spent here.

From the former Warsaw Pact countries, most Soviet-era tanks, cannons, and warplanes have gone east to Ukraine. Now members of NATO will replace their weaponry with NATO-standard equipment, often made by America, which has 12 of the 25 largest weapons manufacturers in the world.

Without costing the life of one American soldier, Ukraine has cut in half the operating capacity of Russia’s military. Two years ago, this military constituted a major threat to America’s 30 NATO treaty partner countries. Since the February 24, 2022, invasion, Ukraine’s military has, by its count, destroyed 4,829 Russian tanks, 9,219 armored personnel carriers, 7,521 artillery cannon and mortars, and 315 fighter bombers. 

By comparison, during the decade-long Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation — dramatized in the film “Charlie Wilson’s War” — Moscow lost 147 tanks, 1,314 armored personnel carriers, 433 artillery and mortar, and 118 fighter bombers.

An Eastern Europe analyst, Timothy Ash, concludes: “When viewed from a bang-per-buck perspective, US and Western support for Ukraine is an incredibly cost-effective investment.”

On the personnel side, the Russian army has lost 282,630 soldiers killed and wounded in Ukraine. During the 1980s in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union lost about 75,000 killed and wounded. At that time, the Soviet Union had a population of 275 million, almost twice Russia’s population today of 144 million. The Soviet population of 40 years ago had a younger profile than Russia’s today.

Next year, Russia plans to double its military spending to 6 percent of its GDP. Russia’s military spending is to hit $108 billion, the highest level since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. By contrast, American military aid to Ukraine amounts to 0.3 percent of America’s gross domestic product.

Two days before Hamas attacked Israel, Mr. Putin told a meeting of academics and journalists in Sochi: “Just imagine if the aid stops tomorrow…[Ukraine] will live for only a week until they run out of ammo.” To defend Western aid flows, President Zelensky now says Ukraine and Israel are fighting the same fight.

“Iran can’t say it has nothing to do with what is going on in Ukraine if it sells Shaheds [drones] to Russia,” Mr. Zelensky told NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly in Copenhagen via video link on Monday. “Iran can’t say it has nothing to do with what is going on in Israel, if its officials claim the support of what is going on in Israel.”

A solution that appeals to both Republican budget cutters and Democratic internationalists would for Western governments to seize the $400 billion in Russian government assets that are frozen in American, British, and European banks. Canada already has passed legislation to allow this.

“The extraordinary thing is that our politicians seem to think it is OK to charge Western taxpayers for Ukrainian victory and recovery, but give all the Russian money back,” writes Mr. Ash, who is the senior emerging markets sovereign strategist at RBC BlueBay Asset Management. 

“I mean how does that work? The aggressor wins? It pays to be the aggressor?” Mr. Ash asks. “The lawyers and bean counters say it cannot be done. Take it out of their hands.”