A meme has gone viral on Russian social media networks with a quote from President Vladimir Putin, “We don’t quit on our personal,” positioned subsequent to his pictures with the leaders he as soon as declared Moscow’s “key allies”.
There have been Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who was toppled and killed in 2011, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who was toppled and fled to Moscow in 2024, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, who was toppled and rushed to Moscow in 2014.
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After which there was an image of Putin and his radiant Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro, who was dragged out of his bedroom by United States Delta Pressure commandos on Saturday and is now awaiting trial in New York on drug trafficking charges.
Earlier than abducting him, US army forces struck the Buk-2MA air defence techniques and radars Russia provided to Venezuela and put in at seaports and airports as a part of their “strategic alliance”.
Nonetheless, Moscow’s defence cooperation treaty with Caracas was obscure and didn’t envisage quick army assist in case of a international invasion.
And although Russia’s Ministry of International Affairs called Maduro’s seize an “unacceptable act of armed aggression”, Putin shunned saying something in any respect – not to mention meddling militarily.
‘Putin’s status and repute suffered a blow’
The results for Russia are two-pronged, observers informed Al Jazeera.
There’s quick harm to the Kremlin’s already-tarnished worldwide repute however long-term advantages for Moscow’s insistence on having carte blanche in Ukraine and the previous Soviet Union, together with energy-rich Central Asia.
“On the one hand, Putin’s status and repute suffered a blow as Maduro was his most loyal ally in Latin America,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence assume tank, informed Al Jazeera. “Much more vital to Putin is that together with his actions, Trump is establishing a brand new world order.”
However this ally’s worth can not presumably outweigh the significance of a brand new world order that US President Donald Trump is establishing, he mentioned.
“And this new world order is now primarily based on the precedence of pressure, not on the worldwide legislation whose cornerstone was the sovereignty of countries,” he mentioned.
What occurred with Maduro resembles Moscow’s army inaction after al-Assad’s panicked flight from Damascus to Moscow in December 2024 throughout the takeover of Syria by opposition forces.
One principle is that Trump and Putin wrote Maduro off throughout their August summit in Anchorage, Alaska.
“Maybe in Anchorage and even earlier, there was a dialog concerning the limitation of spheres of curiosity on the earth,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russia researcher with Germany’s Bremen College, informed Al Jazeera.
The settlement might have included concessions from Trump on Ukraine for the sake of future, post-war joint growth of hydrocarbons in Russia’s Arctic areas whereas Washington beneficial properties management over Greenland.
“Trump’s persistent want to take over Greenland is constructed from the identical material,” Mitrokhin mentioned. “From there, he’d need to management the northern a part of ‘his a part of the world’.”
And after Russia’s current oilfields are tapped out, US corporations is also instrumental within the growth of the Bazhenovska Svita, the world’s largest shale oil deposits within the swampy plains of western Siberia.
US oil corporations pioneered the extraction of shale oil and gasoline whereas Russian companies lack the applied sciences and experience.
Management over Bazhenovska Svita would assist the White Home kill a a lot greater geopolitical chicken with the identical stone.
“The US wants Bazhenovska Svita to forestall China from getting there because it might kind Beijing’s vitality independence,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch informed Al Jazeera.
In the meantime, the lack of Maduro doesn’t pose any peril to Russia as media and public figures influenced by the Kremlin use the brazen seize of a international president to lambast Washington’s “imperialism”, he mentioned.
‘Putin won’t get nearer to Trump’
One other professional mentioned giving up on Maduro won’t assist Putin to fix ties with Trump immediately.
On Monday, Trump said he “didn’t consider” Putin’s declare that Ukraine had tried to kill the Russian president at his Valdai residence in northwestern Russia in late December.
“By closing his eyes on Maduro’s seize, Putin won’t get nearer to Trump,” Galiya Ibragimova, an professional with the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace assume tank, informed Al Jazeera.
“Putin is most frightened by the truth that in Maduro’s coterie, there was an individual who leaked data to People, and now Putin – together with his paranoid conviction that everybody is after him – will firstly enhance his personal safety,” she mentioned.
Maduro’s “extraction” might even encourage Putin to plan the kidnapping of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she mentioned.
On the daybreak of his presidency within the early 2000s, Putin developed ties with Maduro’s socialist predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez regardless of Moscow’s rising political tilt to rightward nationalism.
Chavez paid billions for Russian-made weapons similar to tanks, helicopters, fighter jets and missiles, and Moscow even opened a manufacturing facility in Venezuela to fabricate AK-47 assault rifles.
Russian consultants performed a key position in Venezuela’s financial lifeline – the processing of heavy, hard-to-extract crude.
Nonetheless, their outdated applied sciences couldn’t presumably forestall the decline in Venezuela’s crude manufacturing, which helped trigger a years-long financial nosedive, hyperinflation and mind drain of oil consultants from geologists to engineers.
After coming to energy in 2013, Maduro met with Putin a dozen occasions, and every of his visits to Moscow was a red-carpet, pompous affair filled with rhetoric and mutual assurances of “everlasting friendship”.
In October, Maduro despatched a plea to Putin, urging him to ship missiles for Russia-supplied S-300 air defence techniques, restore Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets, and provide radars and different unspecified “logistical assist”, The Washington Put up reported.
He additionally requested for a “financing plan”, the newspaper mentioned, including that it was not clear whether or not Moscow replied to the plea.
In the meantime, pro-Kremlin voices current Maduro’s fall as a part of an anti-Moscow plan that may actually “fail.”
“We merely need to fathom that the collective West won’t ever quit on its makes an attempt to defeat Russia,” analyst Kirill Strelnikov wrote in an opinion piece for the RIA Novosti information company on Tuesday. “You possibly can strive – and can fall from far above and painfully.”
