The American operation against Nicolas Maduro has caused perplexity in Russia, which has seen its geopolitical ambitions seriously diminished in just over a year.
First, there was the revolt in Syria, which the Russian secret services were unable to foresee and which led to the escape of the dictator. Basher Al Asad to Moscow and the hasty eviction of the Khmeimim and Tartus military bases. Both represented access to the Mediterranean for the Kremlin and are now in limbo waiting for the consolidation of the regime. Ahmed Al-Shara.
The country that was once the home of the Kremlin and the Iranian ayatollahs is now in a state close to civil war, with justified fear of the reinforcement of ISIS and bombing by Western powers such as France and the United Kingdom. No trace of Russian influence in a government whose president recently met with Donald Trump in the White House seeking official recognition. We must not forget that Al-Shara was on the list of the most wanted jihadists for its relations with Al Qaeda.
After the fall of Al-Assad in December 2024, came the attacks by Israel and the United States against Iranian nuclear facilities. The synchronicity between Iran and Russia is absolute. Their interests in the Middle East coincide and at the same time completely diverge from those of the Israelis, Americans and a good part of the Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia. Iran continues to arm Russia with Shahed drones after four years of conflict in Ukraine and is one of the few diplomatic allies that has always supported the invasion.
However, both the collapse of the Syrian regime and the weakening of the Iranian armed forces, which had already seen Israel decimate its Axis of Resistance with the virtual destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah, had something in common: Russia did not lift a finger. Both countries had Russian military equipment for their defense and this equipment failed calamitously.
Both regimes, it is understandable, expected a diplomatic or military reaction from their Russian ally and this never came. The same It seems that it is going to happen with Venezuela.
Vladimir Putin’s surprising silence
It is difficult to overestimate the importance that Venezuela has had for Russia for years. It is a rich country, with vast natural resources and besieged by Western sanctions, which practically reduced its ability to trade with some of its Latin American neighbors, Russia and China.
We are talking about a lot of money, just as Trump himself has been repeating since he assured on Saturday that the United States was going to take control of these resources. So much so that it seems that Delcy Rodríguez and the rest of the Chavista apparatus are not going to mind sharing it.
The fact that that money and resources are now going to flow north and not east is a blow to the Kremlinas is the evidence, once again, that their very expensive air defense systems have once again become useless. Nor has the deployment of the Cuban army in support of the Maduro dictatorship, to the point that in Havana they have had to acknowledge that 32 of their soldiers died trying to defend the former Venezuelan president.
Even more surprising, if possible, is that the silence. Of course, the ambassador to the UN, Vasili Nebenzia, has condemned the American intervention, as have some members of the Kremlin, but the president, Vladimir Putin has not said a word.
Considering the importance of the American movement and the dramatic consequences it can have for his country – Putin still thinks that Trump is his puppet when he is probably nothing more than a man with the same sense of morality – it is strange that the Russian leader has nothing to say about it.
The “special military operation” that failed with Zelensky
The failures in Syria, Iran and Venezuela result in the failure of the “special military operation” launched almost four years ago against Ukraine and its president, Volodímir Zelenski. The linguistic euphemism already indicates that the idea was to undertake an American-style surgical attack in Venezuela: settle in kyiv in three days, put an end to the resistance in the rest of the country and, above all, capture, kill or force the Ukrainian president to go into exile.
If Zelensky remains in kyiv it is, of course, not because of Putin’s kindness or his respect for international laws. It is simply because the Russian tanks got stuck on the way and the paratroopers failed to take the Hostómel airport, the real turning point at the beginning of the war.
Furthermore, if Zelensky never had to leave his country’s capital, as Western leaders continually offered him, and did not even have to hide in a steel chamber, since he uploaded videos from the street as the Russians approached, it was because of the absolute failure of Russian intelligence.
There was a time when Mossad, the CIA and the KGB were competing for the honor of being the most effective secret service in the world. The comparison, right now, makes you blush. The current Russian intelligence agencies -FSB, SVR, GRU…- have been unable to counter their Israeli and American counterparts, but they have not even been able to infiltrate Ukrainian intelligence with sufficient solvency, something they took for granted.
The precedents of the “precedent”
That failure in the previous work was what saved Zelensky and what saved Ukraine. The lack of foresight in the international response, the false assessment of pro-Russian sentiment in the country and the erroneous estimates of Russian military capacity have led to a four-year stalemate and a number of casualties, including deaths and injuries, estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
The problem was never one of intention, but rather a clash with reality: beyond moral judgments, Trump did in a few hours which Putin has been unable to do in years.
In that sense, it is logical that Maduro’s arrest be described as a “dangerous precedent”, since the triumph of the law of force It is in itself a defeat of democracy, but no one has set more precedents than Putin over these years: he tried to poison Viktor Yushenko during the 2004 election campaign, he threatened the Georgian government with his troops in 2008 and he has influenced practically every election since he came to power, including the 2016 presidential elections, in favor, ironically, of Donald Trump himself.