British newspaper headlines following the capture of Maduro.
The operation puts leftist regimes under pressure and gives impetus to the continent’s political shift to the right. That the US probably profited from collusion with some of the Maduro regime’s most powerful members will be unsettling for leaderships in the area hostile to Washington. The future of the legacy regime in Caracas will now be determined by US success in exercising remote leverage over it.
The seizure of Maduro has delivered a fright (and salutary message) to governments and leaders hostile to Trump, from Latin America to Iran. It also risks emboldening a jubilant Administration to demonstrate US military capabilities in other settings and encouraging senior Administration figures to overlook the fine line that can exist in sophisticated military operations between success and failure. The US definition of a special military operation differs from Putin’s. While the latter’s operation in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the Soviet Union’s involvement in World War II, the US’s Maduro operation, led by Delta Force, was over in hours. Yet, in some settings, US resolve to avoid putting boots on the ground in hostile environments, other than fleetingly, could prove an emasculating constraint.
Russian reverse in Venezuela in broader geopolitical context
Commentators on the post-Cold War world have traditionally retained a notion of geopolitical blocs. By this paradigm, the US heads a NATO-centred Western bloc and Moscow competes with Washington for global reach through a mixed bag of anti-US client states and arms-supply relationships with key ‘non-aligned’ states. On a traditional analysis, Moscow thus suffered a major setback with Maduro’s extraction. It has previously lost pliable client states in Armenia and Syria. The Western seizures of numerous tankers in Russia’s dark fleet in the last few weeks compounds a prevailing impression of Russian weakness and inability to defend its interests globally.
Yet Moscow has reason to shrug off these reverses; the Western alliance has never seemed as fragile as it appears now. President Trump’s disdain for multilateralism extends to NATO. Whatever compromise emerges to satisfy his demand to control Greenland and its resources, he has shaken NATO’s foundations and the trust of other alliance members. For President Putin, this strategic gain offsets tactical reverses elsewhere in the world that, in other circumstances, he might have found humiliating. A slew of articles in Russian state-aligned outlets have welcomed the war of words between the US and Europe, and lavished praise on Trump.
Putin can exploit the Venezuela precedent to reinforce his own claim of right to dominate the ‘Near Abroad’, specifically Ukraine. Ukraine is the lens through which Putin and every European leader currently view geopolitical events. Trump’s actions on Venezuela and Greenland, which arguably disregard international legal and treaty constraints, help Putin justify his own defiance of a rules-based international order. In this light, the ramifications of the US operation could turn out to be more serious for the US’s traditional allies than for Putin. This is especially so if the muted international reaction induces him to flex his muscles in what he regards as his own backyard, including the Baltic States, and China to accelerate efforts to take Taiwan.
The US Navy has increased operations against Russia’s shadow oil fleet.
The loss of a client state of indifferent value is a small price for Putin to pay for greater freedom to act in a world being ruptured without being remade, one in which great powers can increasingly deal with each other on regional spheres of influence over the heads of lesser powers and impose their agreements on allies and enemies alike. Putin will be content to operate in such a ‘might-is-right’ world. Yet the Venezuela episode is still instructive for him and for those that buy Russian air defence systems.
Question mark now hovering over Russian air defence systems
The startling success of the Maduro operation is dismaying for countries reliant on Russian air defence systems. In the mid-2000s, following a US ban on arms exports to Venezuela, Caracas turned to Russia. In 2009, then President Chávez announced with much fanfare the purchase of the Buk-M2 and S–300 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth commented after the operation: “seems those Russian air defences didn’t quite work so well, did they?”
The control US forces established of Venezuelan air space has caused confidence in Russian SAM systems to sink sharply. Every country deploying them is likely to question whether they were worth the considerable financial and geopolitical outlay expended on them. User countries deploying the S–300 include several FSU countries, Algeria, Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Iran, Vietnam and Cuba. Operational units of the more advanced S–400 are held by China, Turkey and India.
Since Turkey is a NATO member, its purchase of four S–400 missile batteries in a USD 2.5bn deal in 2017 was especially controversial. This agreement reflected a pivot towards Moscow that prompted a swift deterioration in Ankara’s relations with the US and Europe. In March 2017, the EU parliament voted to suspend accession talks. Then, soon after the first battery was delivered, Washington imposed sanctions on a Turkish defence procurement agency and several officials. The purchase resulted in Turkey being excluded from the US-funded F–35 programme, which would have provided its air force with fifth-generation fighters. It was only in October 2025 that PM Starmer signed a contract to provide 20 Eurofighter Typhoons to fill the F–35 hole. The authorities in Ankara will be looking closely at the Venezuela experience and asking: “Was it for this”?
The S–400 has not performed as well as expected in Ukraine, and the S–300s have failed to deter Israeli attacks on Syria and Iran. Yet the systems are still considered advanced. India touted their success during its conflict with Pakistan last May. Months later, its Defence Ministry placed a fresh order for over USD 1bn worth of missiles.
In Venezuela, there were failures of maintenance and operational know-how. Senior US officials have pointed to corruption and poor logistics and noted that Venezuela struggled to service its Russian equipment, often ran out of spares and lacked technical expertise. Reporting suggests many of the systems were not connected to radar or had components still in storage when US forces attacked. Moscow shares the blame for this. Its arms deals with Venezuela included provision of Russian technicians and instructors, whose role was to ensure and maintain the systems’ effectiveness. The diversion of equipment or expertise to the broader Ukraine front, corruption and lax standards may therefore account more than systemic ineffectiveness for the S–300’s operational deficiencies exposed in Caracas.
Can Russia maintain its influence in Venezuela? And what of Cuba?
The Russian Foreign Ministry expressed its “deep concern and condemnation” for “an act of armed aggression against Venezuela”, and called on the world to show “respect for international legal norms”. Putin, as so often during moments of apparent crisis, remained silent. The Kremlin may believe little will change in Caracas and it can preserve its influence. The Trump Administration’s preference for operating through Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy, whom Moscow knows well, offers continuity, instead of regime change. The Kremlin can treat concerns about US control of oil reserves and resulting reductions in the price of crude as overblown. Because of infrastructure deficiencies and the heavy grade of local crude, reviving Venezuela’s oil industry will take years and colossal investment, at which the US private sector has already shown signs of baulking.
Moscow may assess that Trump’s interest in Venezuela will wane and a new local accommodation can emerge that maintains some Russian political influence, while notionally meeting Trump’s demands for control over hydrocarbons. Such an arrangement may even be folded into a wider US-Russia bargain over Ukraine. It is telling that, in 2019, Fiona Hill, formerly of the US National Security Council, testified to Congress on Moscow’s proposal of “some very strange swap arrangement”, in which it offered to back out of Venezuela, if the US stopped getting involved in “our backyard in Ukraine”. Russia’s commitment to Venezuela has long been negotiable and expendable.
As the international system moves into uncharted territory without internationally accepted guidelines on the exercise of military and economic power, Moscow will have its eye on the fate of Cuba. This is an Administration target with great historical resonance, both bilaterally and internationally. Reputationally, it will be harder for Putin to shrug off a comparable US operation against Cuba, in which the Soviet Union and Russia have invested for much longer.
Cuban leaders will be especially nervous. In the past, authoritarian leaders beholden to Moscow could rely on it for a fail-safe ejector button. Bashar al-Assad was flown out of Syria as his brutal regime collapsed around him and received political asylum in Moscow. Maduro, by contrast, is set for a carefully stage-managed public trial in New York. That will keep the US operation and the political outcome in Venezuela in the public eye. It will remind the world of how US actions there set a tone of dangerously overt real politik for the second half of this decade.