Putin to Trump: Let the bargaining begin

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.

Russia’s reaction to America’s gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela has been rather tame by the Kremlin’s standards, with a pro forma feel to it.

The foreign ministry has come out with standard language, issuing statements about “blatant neocolonial threats and external armed aggression.” To be sure, it demanded the U.S. release the captured Nicolás Maduro, and the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev dubbed the whole business “unlawful” — but his remarks also contained a hint of admiration.

Medvedev talked of U.S. President Donald Trump’s consistency and how he is forthrightly defending America’s national interests. Significantly, too, Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to comment directly on the snatching of his erstwhile ally. Nor did the Kremlin miss a beat in endorsing former Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as Venezuela’s interim leader, doing so just two days after Maduro was whisked off to a jail cell in New York.

Overall, one would have expected a much bigger reaction. After all, Putin’s alliance with Venezuela stretches back to 2005, when he embraced Maduro’s boss Hugo Chávez. The two countries signed a series of cooperation agreements in 2018; Russia sold Venezuela military equipment worth billions of dollars; and the relationship warmed up with provocative joint military exercises.

“The unipolar world is collapsing and finishing in all aspects, and the alliance with Russia is part of that effort to build a multipolar world,” Maduro announced at the time. From 2006 to 2019, Moscow extended $17 billion in loans and credit to Venezuela.

So why the current rhetorical restraint? Seems it may all be about bargaining — at least for the Kremlin.

Moscow likely has no wish to rock the boat with Washington over Venezuela while it’s actively competing with Kyiv for Trump’s good graces. Better he lose patience with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and toss him out of the boat rather than Putin.

Plus, Russia probably has zero interest in advertising a hitherto successful armed intervention in Ukraine that would only highlight its own impotence in Latin America and its inability to protect its erstwhile ally.

Indeed, there are grounds to suspect the Kremlin must have found Maduro’s surgically executed removal and its stunning display of U.S. hard power quite galling. As POLITICO reported last week, Russia’s ultranationalists and hard-line militarists certainly did: “All of Russia is asking itself why we don’t deal with our enemies in a similar way,” posted neo-imperialist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, counseling Russia to do it “like Trump, do it better than Trump. And faster.” Even Kremlin mouthpiece Margarita Simonyan conceded there was reason to “be jealous.”

From Russia’s perspective, this is an understandable sentiment — especially considering that Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine was likely conceived as a quick decapitation mission aimed at removing Zelenskyy and installing a pro-Kremlin satrap in his place. Four years on, however, there’s no end in sight.

It’s essentially a demonstration of America’s military might that highlights the limits of Russia’s military effectiveness. So, why draw attention to it?

However, according to Bobo Lo — former deputy head of the Australia mission in Moscow and author of “Russia and the New World Disorder” — there are other explanations for the rhetorical restraint. “Maduro’s removal is quite embarrassing but, let’s be honest, Latin America is the least important area for Russian foreign policy,” he said.

Besides, the U.S. operation has “a number of unintended but generally positive consequences for the Kremlin. It takes the attention away from the conflict in Ukraine and reduces the pressure on Putin to make any concessions whatsoever. It legitimizes the use of force in the pursuit of vital national interests or spheres of influence. And it delegitimizes the liberal notion of a rules-based international order,” he explained.

Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institute who oversaw European and Russian affairs at the White House for part of Trump’s first term, echoed these thoughts: “Russia will simply exploit Trump’s use of force in Venezuela — and his determination to rule the country from afar — to argue that if America can be aggressive in its backyard, likewise for Russia in its ‘near abroad.’”

Indeed, as far back as 2019, Hill told a congressional panel the Kremlin had signaled that when it comes to Venezuela and Ukraine, it would be ready to do a swap.

This all sounds like two mob bosses indirectly haggling over the division of territory through their henchmen and actions.

For the Kremlin, the key result of Venezuela is “not the loss of an ally but the consolidation of a new logic in U.S. foreign policy under the Trump administration — one that prioritizes force and national interests over international law,” noted longtime Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s New Eurasian Strategies Center. “For all the reputational damage and some minor immediate economic losses, the Kremlin has reason, on balance, to be satisfied with recent developments: Through his actions, Trump has, in effect, endorsed a model of world order in which force takes precedence over international law.”

And since Maduro’s ouster, Trump’s aides have only made that clearer. While explaining why the U.S. needs to own Greenland, regardless of what Greenlanders, Denmark or anyone else thinks, influential White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN: “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Now that’s language Putin understands. Let the bargaining begin — starting with Iran.