Trump’s superpower flex in Venezuela delivers a humbling blow to Putin’s Russia

With his lightning raid to snatch Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump has shown that President Vladimir Putin’s self-proclaimed “multipolar” world of anti-Western dictatorial alliances from Caracas to Tehran is essentially toothless.

Beyond the humiliation of the world seeing that Putin isn’t a dependable ally when the chips are down — something already witnessed in Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria and Iran — there’s now also the added insult that Trump appears more effective and bolder in pulling off the sort of maverick superpower interventions the Kremlin wishes it could achieve.

In short, Putin has been upstaged at being a law unto himself. While the Russian leader would presumably have loved to remove Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a blitz attack, he’s instead been locked in a brutal war for four years, suffering over 1 million Russian dead and wounded.

“Putin must be unbearably jealous [of Trump],” political analyst and former Kremlin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov told POLITICO. “What Putin promised to do in Ukraine, Trump did in half an hour [in Venezuela].”

The sense that Moscow has lost face was one of the few things independent analysts and Russia’s ultranationalists seemed to agree on.   

Discussing the Caracas raid on his Telegram account, the nationalist spy-turned-soldier and war blogger Igor Girkin, now jailed in a penal colony, wrote: “We’ve suffered another blow to our image. Another country that was counting on Russia’s help hasn’t received it.”

Unreliable ally

For years, Russia has sought to project itself as the main force resisting American-led Western hegemony, pioneering an alliance loosely united by the idea of a common enemy in Washington. Under Putin, Russia presented itself as the chief proponent of this “multipolar” world, which like the Soviet Union would help defend those in its camp. 

Invading Ukraine in 2022, Moscow called upon its allies to rally to its side. 

They largely heeded the call. Iran sold Russia drones. China and India bought its oil. The leaders of those countries in Latin America and Africa, with less to offer economically and militarily, gave symbolic support that lent credence to Moscow’s claim it wasn’t an international pariah and in fact had plenty of friends. 

Recent events, however, have shown those to be a one-way friendships to the benefit of Moscow. Russia, it appears, won’t be riding to the rescue.

The first to realise that cozying up to Russia had been a waste of time were the Armenians. Distracted by the Ukraine war, Moscow didn’t lift a finger to stop Azerbaijan from seizing the ethnic-Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh in a lightning war in 2023. Russian peacekeepers just stood by.  

A year later, the Kremlin was similarly helpless as it watched the collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, which it had propped up for years. Russia even had to abandon Tartous, its vital port on the Mediterranean.

Further undermining its status in the Middle East, Russia was unable to help Iran when Israel and the U.S. last year bombed the Islamic Republic at will. Russia has long been an important strategic partner to Iran in nuclear technology, but it had no answer to the overwhelming display of military aviation used to strike Iran’s atomic facilities.

Now, Venezuela, another of Putin’s longtime allies, has been humiliated, eliciting haughty condemnation (but no action) from Moscow.

Green with envy

Moscow’s energy and military ties to Caracas run deep. Since 1999 Russia has supplied more than $20 billion in military equipment — financed through loans and secured in part by control over Venezuela’s oil industry — investments that will now be of little avail to Moscow.

Maduro’s capture is particularly galling for the Russians, as in the past they have managed to whisk their man to safety — securing a dacha after your escape being among the attractions of any dictator’s pact with Russia. But while ousted Ukrainian leader Viktor Yakunovych and Assad secured refuge in Russia, Maduro on Monday appeared in a New York court dressed in prison garb.

Russian officials, predictably, have denounced the American attack. Russia’s foreign ministry described it as “an unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state,” while senator Alexei Puskov said Trump’s actions heralded a return to the “wild imperialism of the 19th century.”

Sovereignty violations and anachronistic imperialism, of course, are exactly what the Russians themselves are accused of in Ukraine.  

There has also been the usual saber-rattling. 

Alexei Zhuravlev, deputy chairman of Russia’s parliamentary defense committee, said Russia should consider providing Venezuela with a nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile. 

And the military-themed channel ‘Two Majors,’ which has more than 1.2 million followers, posted on Telegram that “Washington’s actions have effectively given Moscow free rein to resolve its own issues by any means necessary.” (As if Moscow had not been doing so already.)

The more optimistic quarters of the Russian camp argue that Trump’s actions in Caracas show international law has been jettisoned, allowing Moscow to justify its own behavior. Others suggest, despite evidence to the contrary in the Middle East, that Trump is adhering to the 19th century Monroe Doctrine and will be content to focus on dominance of the Americas, leaving Russia to its old European and Central Asian spheres of influence.

In truth, however, Putin has followed the might-is-right model for years. What’s embarrassing is that he hasn’t proving as successful at it as Trump.

Indeed, the dominant emotion among Russia’s nationalists appears to be envy, both veiled and undisguised. 

“All of Russia is asking itself why we don’t deal with our enemies in a similar way,” wrote Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent ultranationalist. Russia, he continued, should take a leaf out of Trump’s playbook. “Do like Trump, do it better than Trump. And faster.”

Pro-Kremlin mouthpiece Margarita Simonyan was even more explicit, saying there was reason to “be jealous.”

Various pro-Kremlin commentators also noted tartly that, unlike Russia, the U.S. was unlikely to face repercussions in the form of international sanctions or being “cancelled.” 

To many in Russia, Trump’s audacious move is likely to confirm, rather than upend their world view, said Gallyamov, the analyst.

Russian officials and state media have long proclaimed that the world is ruled by strength rather than laws. The irony, though, is that Trump is showing himself to be more skillful at navigating the law of the jungle than Putin.

“Putin himself created a world where the only thing that matters is success,” Gallyamov added. “And now the Americans have shown how it’s done, while Putin’s humiliation is obvious for everyone to see.”