Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily politics dispatch from the nation’s capital. This is your Tuesday foreign policy edition. I’m Julia Ioffe.

Before we get to the meat and potatoes of today’s letter—who is Vladimir Putin rooting for in the U.S. presidential election?—and as we wait on Hamas and the Israeli government to stop sending mixed messages and actually agree on the Biden ceasefire proposal, I have a couple more Russia-related items. Herewith…

• First, the good news: Things are looking mighty grim for Gazprom, Russia’s state natural gas monopoly, according to a new report commissioned by the company. Most of Gazprom’s export infrastructure was directed toward Europe, and we know what happened with that in the spring of 2022 when Putin decided to invade Ukraine. According to the report, by 2035, exports to Europe are expected to...