Russia Is the World’s Worst Patron

“This morning, the United States carried out an act of armed aggression against Venezuela,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry wrote on January 3, as news emerged of the U.S. operation targeting various Venezuelan military facilities. “This development is extremely concerning and deserving of condemnation.” When the White House confirmed that U.S. special forces had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flown them to New York to stand trial for drug trafficking and other crimes, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that “we strongly urge the U.S. leadership to reconsider their position and release the legitimately elected president of a sovereign country and his spouse.”

Beyond this statement, Moscow did nothing material to help the regime that it has previously called a key strategic partner in Latin America. It was only seven months ago, in May, that Maduro and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at the Kremlin to sign a treaty on strategic partnership and cooperation that stated that Russia and Venezuela would strengthen military ties and reinforce their ability to defend themselves against hostile external forces. Yet the Russians failed to warn Maduro of the U.S. operation or to protect him during the raid; instead, they watched from the sidelines.

The Kremlin’s impotence in Venezuela follows a familiar pattern that has been on display since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago. Absorbed in its protracted war against Kyiv, Moscow has few resources to support its authoritarian partners. In 2024, the Russians stood by as the regime of their long-standing ally Bashar al-Assad collapsed in Syria. Last summer, in response to the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran, another strategic partner, the Russians offered to mediate between the belligerents but weren’t able to supply useful intelligence or air defense equipment that could have made a difference. In the case of Venezuela, Moscow was able to do even less than it did for Damascus and Tehran.

For Putin, the blow from Maduro’s downfall has been especially humiliating. Although Venezuela has long been a drain on Russia’s state coffers because of unrecoverable loans and money-losing oil projects, the country at least offered a certain point of pride: Moscow could claim to have secured a foothold in the United States’ backyard. To authoritarian regimes from Myanmar to Nicaragua, the Kremlin pushed the narrative that Russia is a potent hedge against an overbearing United States. Maduro’s ousting not only makes this rhetoric ring hollow; it also underscores the fact that Venezuela was never Moscow’s to lose.

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Russia and Venezuela have maintained friendly ties for a quarter century. In 2000, Putin and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, both newly elected, met for the first time during a UN General Assembly session in New York. The relationship between Caracas and Moscow, however, remained mostly transactional and pragmatic—not ideological—for nearly a decade. When Chávez embarked on a populist, anti-American course, he was flush with oil profits amid elevated global energy prices and bought up Russian weapons to replace the aging U.S. equipment purchased by his predecessors. The Kremlin, although not yet ideologically committed to confronting the West, exploited Chávez’s anti-Americanism to cultivate a new arms market.

The relationship deepened after Russia’s five-day war against Georgia, in August 2008, and started to take an ideological turn with shared animosity toward U.S. hegemony. Moscow wanted its partners around the world to recognize the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states and dispatched senior officials to persuade them. The efforts initially fell flat; the only state to side with Moscow in the immediate aftermath of the war was Nicaragua, under President Daniel Ortega. But then, in September 2009, on a state visit to Moscow, Chávez announced that Venezuela would also recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

This was largely a transactional arrangement, but it started to shift the Kremlin’s approach toward Venezuela away from pure pragmatism. Within days, Russia opened a $2.2 billion credit line for Caracas to purchase Russian military equipment, despite the fact that the Venezuelan regime had enough oil revenue to pay in cash. The Kremlin also announced large investments in Venezuelan oil by a consortium of the five largest Russian oil companies. Chávez had recently nationalized the assets of two U.S. energy companies, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, and was desperate for new technical and investment partners to develop challenging projects.

Moscow also signaled that it would invest in various industrial, infrastructure, and social projects in Venezuela that would help Chávez boost his popularity and cement his grip on power, which had become more authoritarian over the years. Despite anti-Americanism being an increasingly visible driving force behind the partnership, Moscow was still pursuing its rational self-interest; after a brief dip following the 2008 Great Recession, oil prices were on the rise again, and Russia’s investments and loans appeared to be recoverable.

The Kremlin is unable to help its authoritarian partners address their regime’s vulnerabilities.

It wasn’t until Chávez’s death from cancer, in 2013, that the remaining pragmatic pillars of cooperation started to unravel. Under Maduro, the regime grew ever more repressive, and economic populism—namely, cheap housing projects and nationalizations of foreign businesses—strained the economy. Then, in March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and launched a war in eastern Ukraine, setting the Kremlin on a path of confrontation with the United States. That same year, oil prices crashed, decimating Venezuela’s export revenue, severely reducing government cash flow, and compelling Russian oil companies to cut costs and pare down their programs.

By 2015, the relationship between Russia and Venezuela had devolved into little more than an ideologically driven project fed by Putin’s geopolitical ambitions. If nothing else, Maduro’s Venezuela showcased the Kremlin’s ability to project power globally, especially in the United States’ backyard. Yet Putin ended up making the same mistake that the Soviet leadership did when, despite mounting costs, the Kremlin sought to keep its ideological partners afloat. The Russian state energy giant Rosneft, for instance, has provided billions of dollars in advanced payments to PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil and gas company, that are unlikely to ever be recovered.

Moscow also helped Caracas circumvent U.S. sanctions and invested in the Maduro regime’s ability to withstand pressure from Washington. Russian military personnel staged joint military exercises and conducted training programs in Venezuela, sent military ships to its coasts, and flew Tu-160 nuclear-capable bombers over the Caribbean Sea. In 2019 and 2024, Moscow even dispatched military planes carrying mercenaries from the state-backed Wagner paramilitary company to Caracas to signal direct support for Maduro during protests against his regime after rigged presidential elections. Moscow provided intelligence support as well as air defenses and other weapons every time the regime faced difficulties, including during the most recent U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean.

Still, through it all, the depth of Russia’s commitment to Venezuela has been an open question. In 2019, for instance, the Russian leadership cynically signaled to Washington that it was ready to abandon Venezuela if the United States disengaged from Ukraine, according to congressional testimony by Fiona Hill, who served as senior National Security Council director on Russia and Europe during the first Trump administration. When push came to shove, however, the United States didn’t need Russia’s help. What’s more, all the tools deployed by Moscow proved incapable of protecting its key Latin American ally. Russia was not able to provide timely and accurate intelligence to warn Maduro about the upcoming U.S. operations, and the S-300 and Buk-M2 missile systems Moscow supplied had not been properly maintained or plugged into an integrated air defense system, something that the Russian military would be expected to help with for a strategic partner and buyer of Russian military hardware.

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For the last 20 years, Moscow has demonstrated an ability to inject itself as a player in regions with strong anti-American sentiment. But the Kremlin’s costly adventures have yet to show any practical benefits for enhancing Russia’s genuine security interests or boosting its economic prosperity. Involvement in places such as Venezuela serves only Putin’s vanity, a few votes of solidarity with Moscow at the UN General Assembly, and money-making opportunities for corrupt Russian officials.

Moreover, the Kremlin’s opportunistic approach does not translate into a durable ability to shape outcomes. The Kremlin may be able to prop up or, failing that, provide a gilded exile to authoritarian strongmen. But it is unable to help its partners address their regime’s vulnerabilities through capacity building. In Syria, for example, Russia lent Damascus its airpower and other military tools, but it couldn’t fix the excessive brutality, incompetence, corruption, and economic mismanagement that contributed to the Assad regime’s downfall. In Venezuela, Russia wasn’t able to provide the Maduro regime with timely intelligence, adequate training, or functioning equipment. The Kremlin’s failure stands in sharp contrast to the United States’ success in helping Ukraine foil Putin’s plan for regime change in Kyiv.

Over the last four years, Moscow’s ability to influence global events has been further eroded, as the country’s resources have been consumed by the bottomless hole of the war in Ukraine. The war has made the Putin regime more resilient internally, since the authorities have stomped out virtually all dissent, but it has also diverted all the military equipment, personnel, money, and attention that in theory could have been used to prop up the likes of Maduro.

Moscow may still be able to exercise influence in settings that are not strategically important to Washington, such as the Central African Republic or Tajikistan. But as the unfolding events in Venezuela plainly demonstrate, Russia is not prepared to challenge a resolved United States in faraway theaters. For U.S. policymakers, the lesson should be clear: the Kremlin is not a giant that must be countered in every corner of the planet.

And yet Washington must remain vigilant. Moscow has shown its staying power in situations in which Western interventions go unfinished and create new vacuums to exploit. A year after Assad’s ousting, for instance, the former dictator lives in Moscow; the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, has visited Putin in the Kremlin; and the Russian military maintains a presence in the country, from which it projects power in the eastern Mediterranean and Africa. Likewise, Russia has not abandoned Venezuela; its military personnel and equipment are still there. The Kremlin will be waiting for an opportunity to leverage its presence, especially if the United States’ removal of Maduro leads only to a regrouping of his regime or more chaos on the ground. If conditions in Venezuela continue to deteriorate, the Kremlin will be all too happy to fuel regional instability and then point to Venezuela as yet another example of failed American overreach after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Ultimately, Russia will compensate for its weakness as a partner by reverting to its familiar strength as a spoiler.

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