The United States’ swift operation in Venezuela and the removal of dictator Nicolás Maduro have caused more than just a regime change in Caracas. For the Kremlin, it was a painful symbolic blow, revealing the real limits of Russia as a “great power” and directly affecting Vladimir Putin’s personal ambitions.
The difference is striking: while Russia has been waging a bloody and costly war against Ukraine for years without achieving its stated objectives, Washington has shown that it can act quickly and decisively on the global stage. Journalist Eva Hartog writes in Politico that this demonstration of US power provokes in Moscow a “jealousy”, fueled by the impotence of the Kremlin’s leader.
According to the analysis, Russia was unable to defend one of its most important allies in Latin America. This failure strikes directly at the myth of the “multipolar world”, promoted for years by Putin as an alternative to Western dominance.
“The multipolar world proves to be devoid of real power”
“The multipolar world of anti-Western dictatorships, from Caracas to Tehran, that Putin dreams of, proves to be devoid of real power”, Hartog notes. “In addition to the humiliation of seeing that Russia is not a reliable ally in critical moments, there is now also the frustration that Trump seems more efficient and more daring in imperial-type interventions, exactly the kind of actions that the Kremlin would like to be able to carry out.”
The author recalls that Moscow chose to stand aside in key conflicts: it did not intervene decisively in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, it passively watched the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and did not provide real support to Iran in the face of US and Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities.
“In short, Putin has lost his role as the self-proclaimed ‘supreme arbitrator'”, writes Hartog. “Although he would have liked to eliminate Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski with a swift blow, in reality he has been waging a brutal war for four years, resulting in over a million dead and wounded among the Russians.”
Political analyst Abbas Galiamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter, bluntly says that what Putin promised to do in Ukraine, Trump quickly accomplished in Venezuela. “Putin probably envies Trump unbearably,” he says.
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