Reuters/Ipsos has Donald Trump as a solid favorite to win the election in November. That would be lights out for Ukraine. Probably for Moldova, too. And later on, who knows, maybe for Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Don’t forget Poland!

But the truth is that the Trump doesn’t need to win the election in order to help Russia’s imperial program succeed. All he has to do is prevent the current Congress from passing any new money for Ukraine’s defense. In this, he is on track. While CNN reports many Republican senators are seething about Trump’s interference, that doesn’t mean Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell can prevent a successful filibuster of any Ukraine funding.

What’s odd about this whole situation is that aid for Ukraine somehow got hard-linked to a rather large immigration bill that focuses on the southern border. If you want to understand how this happened, Jonathan Chait has a fairly good explainer at New York magazine.

Basically every Democrat in Congress, along with many Republicans, wants to continue giving military aid to Ukraine so it can defend itself against Russia’s ongoing invasion. But because the issue splits the GOP, and Republicans control the House, passing this aid isn’t easy. House Speaker Mike Johnson can block Ukraine aid from coming to the floor, even though a majority in both chambers favors this aid.

When anti-Ukraine Republicans articulated their opposition to helping Ukraine, they usually framed it as having something to do with the American border. “Critics asked how Biden could justify rushing thousands of troops to assist Ukraine and defend the borders of NATO, yet stubbornly neglect the chaos at our border,” wrote the Heritage Foundation in 2022. “We should be protecting our border, not the border of Ukraine,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene.

In reality, not even Marjorie Taylor Greene is stupid enough to think there is a direct trade-off between helping Ukraine and reducing the surge of asylum claims in the United States. It is simply a rhetorical conceit to avoid admitting that anti-Ukraine Republicans either don’t care about or actively support Russia’s goal of crushing Ukraine, using a facile rhetorical conceit that both issues can be described with the word “border” to create a false choice.

Nonetheless, pro-Ukraine Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, decided to take these “arguments” at face value. Their clever-sounding plan was to hold up aid to Ukraine — aid they themselves support — unless Democrats agreed to secure the border.

That’s half the story. The other half is that the Biden administration went along with this plan, essentially because they saw no better option. In the process, the administration agreed to a very lop-sided border bill agreement. That didn’t make important parts of the Democratic coalition feel too good, but it’s the reason one GOP senator anonymously told CNN that without Trump’s opposition, this border/Ukraine deal would have “overwhelming support within the conference.” It’s the kind of deal the Republicans would not ordinary get. In fact, McConnell explained this to the conference behind closed doors, predicting that even if they won the presidency and both chambers of Congress, they couldn’t overcome a Democratic filibuster next year to pass a bill as good as the one on offer from Biden right now.

But this doesn’t matter. Trump doesn’t want Ukraine to get any money because he’s a tool of Vladimir Putin. And he doesn’t want a tough, bipartisan border bill to pass because he wants to use the border against Biden in the election. Most importantly, the Republicans in Congress are afraid to stick up to Trump because it looks like he’s going to beat Biden.

McConnell seems to alternate between resignation and defiance. For now, he says he hasn’t given up on a deal, but the deal appears dead. His deputy John Thune of South Dakota says there is a Plan B for Ukraine funding, but there’s no plan for Ukraine that Trump won’t oppose.