A statue of Josef Stalin was recently unveiled in Moscow's Taganskaya subway station. It's no anomaly. Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, more than 100 monuments to the Soviet dictator have been erected across Russia.
This tells you all you need to know about Mr. Putin. More importantly, this should tell President Trump all he needs to know about Mr. Putin.
But Mr. Trump is juggling multiple crises, as are his advisors. So, in case they've missed this development, I will endeavor to explain its significance.
Most obviously, a life-size bas-relief that depicts Stalin standing beneath a portrait of Lenin, and surrounded by worshipful Russians, is now on display in the Moscow Metro because that's what Mr. Putin wants.
Which indicates that he reveres Stalin, one of the great tyrants of the 20th century, right up there with Mao and Hitler.
Stalin murdered millions of his own citizens. He sent millions more to rot in the forced labor camps known as the Gulag.
What Ukrainians remember most vividly about Stalin is the Holodomor, the 1932-33 famine he created to punish "kulaks," wealthier peasants, for resisting his collectivization of agriculture. Close to four million Ukrainians starved to death.
It's no coincidence, comrade (as the Soviets used to say) that since invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Mr. Putin has been targeting – in addition to residential neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools – grain storage facilities, ports, and other agricultural infrastructure.
Apologists for Stalin argue that he deserves credit for leading the Soviet Union in World War II.
That ignores the fact that Stalin signed a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany on Aug. 23, 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (named for the foreign ministers of the two countries) included a secret protocol to divide Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence.
Nine days after the Pact was signed, German troops invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, Soviet troops did the same.
The Pact ended abruptly on June 22, 1941, when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. Only after that did Stalin switch to the American and British side.
The Red Army initially took terrible losses because Stalin had previously executed dozens of senior army officers in what became known as the Great Purge of the late 1930s.
Stalin eventually rallied his troops – not by calling on their allegiance to Soviet communism, but by dubbing the conflict a "Patriotic War," and a defense of "Mother Russia."
The enemy, he said in a July 3, 1941 radio broadcast, intends to destroy "the national culture and the national existence as states of the Russians, Ukrainians" and other peoples ruled by the Kremlin.
Following the Nazi surrender, the nations liberated by American and British forces became free. Not so the nations where the Red Army prevailed.
In those states, Stalin established satellite governments that were essentially colonial outposts of Moscow.
At that point, the Russian Empire, rebranded as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was geographically larger and more powerful militarily than it had ever been.
Restoring that empire is Mr. Putin's self-appointed mission.
That's why in 2008 he invaded neighboring Georgia, slicing off two of the country's regions.
That's why in 2014 he first invaded Ukraine, annexing Crimea and inciting an insurgency in Donbas.
That's why he's made Belarus into a vassal state.
That's why he invaded Ukraine again in 2022.
And now, directly to Ukraine's south: Dorin Recean, prime minister of Moldova, not a NATO member, has warned that Russia plans to deploy up to 10,000 troops to Transnistria, a strip of eastern Moldova that has been under de facto Russian control since 1992.
Mr. Putin also has been building up his forces along Russia's borders with Norway and Finland, which are NATO members.
The Russian navy has become increasingly aggressive in the Baltic Sea which is surrounded by eight NATO members.
A slogan Mr. Putin has been displaying on large signs visible to Estonians along their eastern frontier: "Russia's borders stretch to the horizon."
In a White House meeting last week, Friedrich Merz, the new German chancellor, urged Mr. Trump to make good on his vows to exert serious pressure on the Kremlin to accept a ceasefire.
Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton have gathered 82 co-sponsors for the "Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025." It would slap 500% secondary tariffs on imports from countries that buy hydrocarbons or uranium from Russia.
Such economic measures should be coupled with continuing military sales to Ukraine. Failing that, the Ukrainian death toll will rise.
Mr. Putin is betting he can continue "tapping" Mr. Trump along and that, sooner or later, the current president will abandon Ukraine as President Biden abandoned Afghanistan.
He's confident, too, that his axis is ironclad with Communist China, Islamist Iran, and the dynastic dictator in North Korea. Their common goal: preventing America from ever becoming great again.
The analog to Mr. Putin's Stalin statue is the large oil portrait of Ronald Reagan that President Trump prominently displays in the Oval Office.
In 1985, President Reagan stated plainly: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent ...to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth."
He added: "Support for freedom fighters is self-defense."
If President Trump grasps these principles, he'll know which policies promote the American national interest and which signal weakness and retreat.
If he's unsure, let's hope he has advisors willing and able to make the case. They can point to Mr. Putin's subway Stalin as Exhibit A.