abducting<\/a> him, US military forces struck the Buk-2MA air defence systems and radars Russia supplied to Venezuela and installed at seaports and airports as part of their \u201cstrategic alliance\u201d.<\/p>\nHowever, Moscow\u2019s defence cooperation treaty with Caracas was vague and did not envisage immediate military aid in case of a foreign invasion.<\/p>\n
And even though Russia\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called Maduro\u2019s capture an \u201cunacceptable act of armed aggression\u201d, Putin refrained from saying anything at all \u2013 let alone meddling militarily.<\/p>\n
\u2018Putin\u2019s prestige and reputation suffered a blow\u2019<\/h2>\n
The consequences for Russia are two-pronged, observers told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
There is immediate damage to the Kremlin\u2019s already-tarnished international reputation but long-term benefits for Moscow\u2019s insistence on having carte blanche in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, including energy-rich Central Asia.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the one hand, Putin\u2019s prestige and reputation suffered a blow as Maduro was his most loyal ally in Latin America,\u201d Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera. \u201cFar more important to Putin is that with his actions, Trump is establishing a new world order.\u201d<\/p>\n
But this ally\u2019s value cannot possibly outweigh the importance of a new world order that US President Donald Trump is establishing, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this new world order is now based on the priority of force, not on the international law whose cornerstone was the sovereignty of nations,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
What happened with Maduro resembles Moscow\u2019s military inaction after al-Assad\u2019s panicked flight from Damascus to Moscow in December 2024 during the takeover of Syria by opposition forces.<\/p>\n
One theory is that Trump and Putin wrote Maduro off during their August summit in Anchorage, Alaska.<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps in Anchorage or even earlier, there was a conversation about the limitation of spheres of interest in the world,\u201d Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russia researcher with Germany\u2019s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
The agreement may have included concessions from Trump on Ukraine for the sake of future, post-war joint development of hydrocarbons in Russia\u2019s Arctic regions while Washington gains control over Greenland.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump\u2019s persistent desire to take over Greenland is made from the same cloth,\u201d Mitrokhin said. \u201cFrom there, he\u2019d want to control the northern part of \u2018his part of the world\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
And after Russia\u2019s existing oilfields are tapped out, US companies could also be instrumental in the development of the Bazhenovska Svita, the world\u2019s largest shale oil deposits in the swampy plains of western Siberia.<\/p>\n
US oil companies pioneered the extraction of shale oil and gas while Russian firms lack the technologies and expertise.<\/p>\n
Control over Bazhenovska Svita would help the White House kill a much bigger geopolitical bird with the same stone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States needs Bazhenovska Svita to prevent China from getting there as it could form Beijing\u2019s energy independence,\u201d Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the loss of Maduro does not pose any peril to Russia as media and public figures influenced by the Kremlin use the brazen capture of a foreign president to lambast Washington\u2019s \u201cimperialism\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Putin will not get closer to Trump\u2019<\/h2>\n
Another expert said giving up on Maduro will not help Putin to mend ties with Trump right away.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Trump said he \u201cdidn\u2019t believe\u201d Putin\u2019s claim that Ukraine had tried to kill the Russian president at his Valdai residence in northwestern Russia in late December.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy closing his eyes on Maduro\u2019s capture, Putin will not get closer to Trump,\u201d Galiya Ibragimova, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cPutin is most frightened by the fact that in Maduro\u2019s coterie, there was a person who leaked information to Americans, and now Putin \u2013 with his paranoid conviction that everyone is after him \u2013 will firstly boost his own security,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Maduro\u2019s \u201cextraction\u201d may even inspire Putin to plan the kidnapping of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she said.<\/p>\n
At the dawn of his presidency in the early 2000s, Putin developed ties with Maduro\u2019s socialist predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez despite Moscow\u2019s growing political tilt to rightward nationalism.<\/p>\n
Chavez paid billions for Russian-made weapons such as tanks, helicopters, fighter jets and missiles, and Moscow even opened a factory in Venezuela to manufacture AK-47 assault rifles.<\/p>\n
Russian experts played a key role in Venezuela\u2019s economic lifeline \u2013 the processing of heavy, hard-to-extract crude.<\/p>\n
However, their outdated technologies could not possibly prevent the decline in Venezuela\u2019s crude production, which helped cause a years-long economic nosedive, hyperinflation and brain drain of oil experts from geologists to engineers.<\/p>\n
After coming to power in 2013, Maduro met with Putin a dozen times, and each of his visits to Moscow was a red-carpet, pompous affair full of rhetoric and mutual assurances of \u201ceternal friendship\u201d.<\/p>\n
In October, Maduro sent a plea to Putin, urging him to send missiles for Russia-supplied S-300 air defence systems, repair Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets, and supply radars and other unspecified \u201clogistical support\u201d, The Washington Post reported.<\/p>\n
He also asked for a \u201cfinancing plan\u201d, the newspaper said, adding that it was not clear whether Moscow replied to the plea.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin voices present Maduro\u2019s fall as part of an anti-Moscow plan that will certainly \u201cfail.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe simply have to fathom that the collective West will never give up on its attempts to defeat Russia,\u201d analyst Kirill Strelnikov wrote in an opinion piece for the RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday. \u201cYou can try \u2013 and will fall from far above and painfully.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A meme has gone viral on Russian social media networks with a quote from President Vladimir Putin, \u201cWe don\u2019t give up on our own,\u201d placed next to his photos with the leaders he once declared Moscow\u2019s \u201ckey allies\u201d. There were Libya\u2019s Muammar Gaddafi, who was toppled and killed in 2011, Syria\u2019s Bashar al-Assad, who was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}