Russia wants back in. To the club of US dollar users.

There are two main problems with the de-dollarization push, if you can call nascent efforts to find alternatives to a thoroughly weaponized US currency a proper “push.”

The first problem’s a lack of viable alternatives. If you get yourself kicked out of the dollar club as a nation, there’s no efficient way to do business at scale with countries who are still in the club, even if they’re willing. The second problem is that they generally won’t be — won’t be willing, I mean. Because they’ll fear being kicked out themselves.

The excommunicated thus face an insurmountable logistical challenge (i.e., a lack of non-USD financial and commercial infrastructure) and fearful reticence on the part of anyone who might otherwise be inclined to facilitate non-USD transactions and trade. The latter reinforces the former, and vice versa, condemning pariah states like Iran and North Korea to desperation and destitution in perpetuity.

China’s strong enough now to provide a lifeline for USD dissidents, but going that route’s a tourniquet — it’ll save your life, but only for a while. India has enough clout, and America enough respect for New Delhi’s principled neutrality, to step in on an emergency basis, but that’s not even a tourniquet. That’s a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

Hard as this is for a lot of people — myself included in some respects — to admit and accept, it’s just not feasible to run a country while being completely cut off from the US dollar. Even if you’re lucky enough to have one of modern history’s most adroit economic managers at the helm of your central bank (as Vladimir Putin does in Elvira Nabiullina), you’ll bleed out and, if you don’t want to die, tap out, eventually.

With that in mind, Bloomberg on Thursday revealed what it says are the details of an internal Kremlin memo setting out a series of “proposals” which, together, would serve as the foundation for “a wide-ranging economic partnership with the Trump administration.” One of those proposals posits Russia’s reentry into the dollar club where that means, first and foremost, the renewed settlement of Russian oil and gas sales in the US currency.

It’s not, strictly speaking, impossible for Russia to obtain dollars for its energy, but dollar settlements are a circuitous nightmare for Moscow for obvious reasons: Nobody wants to be on any record, anywhere facilitating USD transactions for Putin’s contraband commodities. Hence the Kremlin’s patchwork of yuan, rupee and ruble deals, augmented by a clumsy constellation of agreements that don’t differ materially from old-world barter.

Putin claims he’s building a new network that’ll accrue to Russia’s benefit in the form of a liberated, highly adaptive, non-beholden energy powerhouse free to thumb its nose at the US Treasury by virtue of its alternative arrangements but — and readers will pardon the profanity — we all know that’s a f–king joke. Have you seen the tankers in Putin’s “dark fleet”? They look like something someone drug up off the ocean floor and patched up with duct tape and Bondo.

In this White House, the Kremlin sees a face-saving opportunity. Trump’s not keen to embarrass a man he exalts, and if Putin offers a package of potentially lucrative economic incentives that Trump can pitch as a “win” in exchange for a Russia-friendly Ukraine truce and re-admission to the dollar settlement club, Trump would happily accept. And just as happily foist the deal on Kyiv.

Re-joining is tantamount to re-submitting to dollar hegemony, something a proud Putin’s surely loath to do but then again, who’s going to argue with him or call him a quitter inside Russia? No one who wants to live another day. And I dare say a silent majority of Russians would quietly rejoice at an end to his “special military operation” almost regardless of terms.

Of course, this is Putin we’re talking about, so you can be absolutely sure the proposals to Trump are designed specifically to manipulate a US president who still, to this day, underestimates just how dangerous his counterpart in Moscow really is.

In their coverage, which you should read, Bloomberg cites western officials who described the Russian memo as “crafted specifically to deepen the divisions between the US and Ukraine’s European allies” and full of “distant promises with big numbers attached that might never materialize.”