This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
It may be happening again.
In 2019, the United States backed an opposition leader seeking to unseat Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Russia opposed the push, providing diplomatic assistance and a modicum of military support for a government that may be Moscow’s most important partner in Latin America.
Maduro survived the crisis when Juan Guaido’s call for a military uprising failed and his bid for power fizzled — a big relief for Russia and a blow to the United States, which considers Maduro illegitimate. Serving his first term at the time, US President Donald Trump had recognized Guaido as interim president of Venezuela in January 2019.
While the circumstances are very different today, the United States is again ratcheting up pressure on Maduro.
It has built up a big military presence in the Caribbean, where it is now sending an aircraft carrier — the USS Gerald R Ford, commonly accepted as the world’s largest warship — and has conducted numerous strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens of people.
US officials have been citing a 2020 drug-crimes indictment against Maduro, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling him a “fugitive from American justice.” In August the United States doubled a bounty for information leading to his capture to $50 million.
A CBS interview released on November 2 saw Trump play down concerns that the United States would go to war against Venezuela but, asked if Maduro’s days were numbered, said, “I think so, yeah.”
Maduro is reportedly again turning to Russia for support — but analysts say that if Washington makes a concerted effort to oust him, Moscow’s levers to prevent it are limited.
“To put it bluntly, there is nothing much Russia can do, if the USA is determined to try and bring Maduro down, beyond diplomatic overtures,” said Mark Galeotti, an author, Russia analysist, and honorary professor at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Seeking Support?
In an October 31 report, The Washington Post said documents it obtained show Maduro wrote a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin asking Moscow to bolster Venezuela’s air defenses by restoring previously purchased Sukhoi warplanes, helping Caracas overhaul engines and radars and acquire missiles, and providing logistical support.
The letter was to be delivered by Venezuela’s transportation minister, whom Russia says traveled to Moscow in mid-October, according to the Post, which also reported that Maduro was seeking support from China and Iran.
It’s not clear whether the letter was delivered to, or received by, the Kremlin. Neither Russian nor Venezuelan officials have commented on the report or made public statements about specific new backing for Maduro’s government.
However, a large Russian Il-76 transport plane arrived in Caracas in late October after flying a circuitous route with several stops, according to the flight tracking site FlightData24. It is unclear what the aircraft was carrying.
‘Ready To React’
On November 1, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow denounces “the use of excessive military force in carrying out actions in anti-drug operations” and “confirms our firm support for the Venezuelan leadership in defending its national sovereignty.”
Two days earlier, Zakharova said Russia was “in contact with our partners” and was “ready to continue to react in the appropriate fashion to their requests, taking into account existing and potential threats.”
A new strategic partnership agreement between Russia and Venezuela, discussed during Maduro’s visit to Moscow in May, entered into force after Putin signed it, Russian state media reported on October 27. But such pacts are often short on specifics.
Experts say most of Russia’s military operations in the Western Hemisphere have been largely for show, a reminder to the West that Moscow’s forces are able to venture further afield than they could when the cash-strapped country pulled back in the wake of the 1991 Soviet collapse.
In 2018, two nuclear-capable Russian strategic bombers landed at a military airport outside Caracas. In July 2024, two Russian naval ships docked in Venezuela ahead of an election that extended Maduro’s rule and was denounced by the United States as a sham.
Amid the bid to oust Maduro in 2019, Moscow acknowledged it had military personnel on the ground after photos showed nearly 100 Russian soldiers emerging from two military aircraft.
Levers And Limitations
In a report published by the US-based Kennan Institute’s Wilson Center in 2020, Colombia-based analyst Vladimir Rouvinski wrote that the “first continuous presence of Russian military personnel in the Western Hemisphere” since the withdrawal from Cuba in the early 1990s was “a clear manifestation of the Kremlin’s determination to keep Venezuela within Russia’s orbit.”
“Many other Russian-sponsored or -assisted actions helped keep Maduro in power,” including Moscow’s blockage of a US-backed UN Security Council resolution, Rouvinski wrote. But at the same time, “the crisis in Venezuela laid bare the many limitations of Russian policy,” such as “a shortage of…financial resources to support its policy in Latin America.”
Russia’s resources, financial and military, are more stretched than they were in 2019: That was three years before Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, committing the vast majority of the country’s military personnel and assets to a costly war with no end in sight and triggering waves of Western economic sanctions.
Even were it not on the attack in the biggest war in Europe since 1945, Russia’s distance from Venezuela would be a serious limitation to substantial backing if it comes to that.
“I think that if the US is serious about regime change in Venezuela by force, Russia is unlikely to be able to help in any way,” Oleg Ignatov, senior Russia analyst at the Crisis Group, told RFE/RL in an e-mailed comment. “This was impossible both before and after the [start of the] war in Ukraine. Elementary geography and logistics are at play here.”
Trump has sent mixed signals about whether the United States is considering striking drug-related targets inside Venezuela. “The land is going to be next,” he said on October 23 in comments about the strikes on boats. But on October 31, when asked if media reports that he was considering strikes within Venezuela were true, the US president said: “No.”
The fall of Maduro would be a major blow to Moscow, potentially depriving it of a key foothold in Latin America and echoing the ouster in December 2024 of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, which has weakened the Kremlin’s influence in the Middle East.
In addition to Maduro’s status as an ally in Moscow’s geopolitical confrontation with Washington and the West, Russia has invested heavily in oil production in Venezuela, which has the largest proven oil reserves in the world — though US sanctions mean the two countries are both seeking to sell to some of the same buyers, such as China.
Geopolitical Calculus
While the war against Ukraine has focused Moscow on acquiring arms itself, Caracas in the past, at least, has been a substantial buyer of Russian weapons. Amid the US buildup nearby, Maduro said on October 22 that Venezuela has 5,000 Russian-made Igla-S missiles in “key air defense positions.”
Despite those ties, Moscow may see the growing US pressure on Venezuela as a development that draws Washington’s attention away from Ukraine, lessening the chances of additional pressure on Russia to halt the invasion.
Putin’s Kremlin might even see a silver lining in Maduro’s departure if the United States were to force him from power.
“In a perverse way…Moscow would gain by such an operation, in that it would strengthen its claim that it is the West, not Russia, that is the enemy of the Global South: arrogant, violent and imperialist,” Galeotti wrote in an e-mailed comment to RFE/RL.
“Russia is, after all, still able to find allies and clients in the Global South, whether out of conviction or, more often, pragmatism, and always takes advantage of Western adventurism to hammer home its claim that the liberal global order is simply a scam to bend the world to Western interest,” he wrote.
