A meme featuring President Vladimir Putin’s words “We will not give up on ourselves” next to a photo of him with leaders he once declared “important allies” has gone viral on Russian social media networks.
They were Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who was overthrown and killed in 2011, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who was overthrown and fled to Moscow in 2024, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown and rushed to Moscow in 2014.
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And there was a photo of Putin and his illustrious Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolas Maduro. President Maduro was dragged from his bedroom by US Delta Force special forces on Saturday and is currently awaiting trial in New York on drug trafficking charges.
Before his abduction, the US military attacked Buk-2MA air defense systems and radars supplied by Russia to Venezuela as part of a “strategic alliance” and installed at ports and airports.
However, Moscow’s defense cooperation treaty with Caracas was vague and did not envisage immediate military assistance in the event of a foreign invasion.
Furthermore, although the Russian Foreign Ministry called Maduro’s capture an “unacceptable act of armed aggression,” President Putin refrained from making any comments, let alone interfering militarily.
“President Putin’s prestige and reputation have taken a hit.”
The impact on Russia is two-pronged, observers told Al Jazeera.
While there will be immediate damage to the Kremlin’s already tarnished international reputation, there are also long-term interests for Moscow, which insists on a clean slate in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, including energy-rich Central Asia.
“On the one hand, President Maduro was President Putin’s most loyal ally in Latin America, so President Putin’s prestige and reputation took a hit,” Alisher Ilkhamov, director of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence Think Tank, told Al Jazeera. “What is far more important to President Putin is that President Trump is establishing a new world order by his actions.”
But the value of this ally cannot outweigh the importance of the new world order that US President Donald Trump is trying to establish, he said.
“And this new world order is now based on a preference for force rather than on international law, which is based on the sovereignty of states,” he said.
What happened with Maduro is similar to Moscow’s military inaction after al-Assad panicked and fled Damascus for Moscow in December 2024 during the rebel occupation of Syria.
According to one theory, President Trump and President Putin saw off President Maduro at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska in August.
Nikolai Mitrokhin, a Russia researcher at Germany’s University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera: “There was probably a conversation in Anchorage or even earlier about limiting the world’s areas of interest.”
The agreement may have included Trump’s concessions on Ukraine for the purpose of joint postwar hydrocarbon development in Russia’s Arctic region in the future while the United States gains control of Greenland.
“President Trump’s persistent desire to take over Greenland is also made from the same cloth,” Mitrokhin said. “From there, he will want to rule the north of ‘his world’.”
And after Russia’s existing oil fields are developed, American companies could also help develop Bazhenovska Svita, the world’s largest shale oil deposit in the wetlands of Western Siberia.
While US oil companies have pioneered the extraction of shale oil and gas, Russian companies lack the technology and expertise.
If it can control Bazienowska Svita, the White House will kill a large geopolitical bird with the same stone.
Kyiv-based analyst Alexei Kuszczy told Al Jazeera: “China could form an energy independence for the Chinese government and the US needs Bazhenovska Svita to stop it from getting there.”
Meanwhile, he said the loss of Mr. Maduro poses no danger to Russia, as Kremlin-influenced media and celebrities have used the brazen capture of a foreign president to denounce Washington’s “imperialism.”
“President Putin will not approach President Trump.”
Another expert said giving up on Maduro won’t help Putin repair relations with Trump any time soon.
President Trump on Monday said he “doesn’t believe” Putin’s claims that Ukraine tried to kill the Russian president at his Valdai residence in northwestern Russia in late December.
Galya Ibragimova, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told Al Jazeera: “Putin will never get close to Trump if he turns a blind eye to Maduro’s capture.”
“President Putin’s biggest fear is the fact that there was someone in President Maduro’s circle who leaked information to the American people, and now President Putin is first trying to shore up his own security in the paranoid belief that everyone is after him.”
Maduro’s “extraction” could even prompt Putin to plan to kidnap Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, she said.
At the beginning of his presidency in the early 2000s, Putin cultivated a relationship with Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s socialist predecessor and leader, despite Moscow’s increasingly nationalist political leanings.
Chavez paid billions of dollars for Russian weapons such as tanks, helicopters, fighter jets and missiles, and the Russian government even opened a factory in Venezuela to make AK-47 assault rifles.
Russian experts played a key role in Venezuela’s economic lifeline, processing heavy and difficult-to-extract crude oil.
But their outdated technology is unlikely to prevent Venezuela’s oil production from declining, leading to years of economic collapse, hyperinflation, and a brain drain of oil experts from geologists to engineers.
Since coming to power in 2013, Maduro has met with Putin more than a dozen times, each visit to Moscow a grand red-carpet affair filled with rhetoric and mutual assurances of “eternal friendship.”
In October, Maduro sent a petition to Putin asking him to send missiles for the Russian-supplied S-300 air defense system, repair Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets, and provide radar and other unspecified “logistical support,” the Washington Post reported.
The newspaper said he also asked for a “financial plan,” adding that it was unclear whether the Russian government had responded to the plea.
Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin voices claim that Maduro’s ouster is part of an anti-Moscow plan that is sure to “fail.”
“We just have to guess that the entire Western world will never give up on trying to defeat Russia,” analyst Kirill Strelnikov said in an op-ed for RIA Novosti News Agency on Tuesday. “If you try, you’ll fall from far up in the sky and it will hurt.”
