New York Times: That’s why Putin remained silent when Trump challenged him to intervene in Venezuela
The New York Times wondered why Russian President Vladimir Putin remained silent when his US counterpart Donald Trump challenged him to intervene directly in Venezuela, which is Moscow’s strategic partner in Latin America, at a time when Caracas and Moscow were looking forward to a “brilliant future” in the international arena.
A New York Times analyst began with a meeting last May in the Kremlin between Putin and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who spoke of a bright shared future that would see “blossoming relations between great Russia, which is today the world’s leading power, and Venezuela”.
Eight months after that meeting, Maduro is languishing some 4,700 miles from the Kremlin in a federal detention center in New York after being arrested by US special forces in Caracas last Saturday, in a military raid ordered by President Trump.
More than a week after the operation, which has sparked controversy around the world, President Putin remains silent, a stance that the New Yok Times believes reflects Russia’s approach in the past few months in downplaying the importance of US actions that in the past would have angered Moscow and threatened.
President Putin has become keen to avoid provoking animosity with the US administration while seeking some gains in Ukraine, even if that means avoiding getting involved in other international issues on which he has previously been hard-lining.
Putin remained silent even when the US military on Wednesday seized a sanctioned Russian flagged oil tanker, and Russia made do with a brief statement from the Transportation Department, which the New York Times called unusual restraint from a country that has long threatened nuclear war.
According to Hannah Knott, director of the Eurasia Program at the Washington-based James Martin Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation Studies, “President Putin has one goal in mind: victory in Ukraine, and therefore it’s not in his interest to provoke the US administration in Latin America.
In addition to what it described as strategic reticence, the New York Times believes that Putin’s capabilities have become limited after Russia’s influence has declined globally to the point that it has become unable to intervene in the course of events in allied countries, such as what happened in late 2024 in Syria when the regime of President Bashar al Assad fell, what happened to President Maduro, and the demonstrations that Iran is currently witnessing that threaten the future of the ruling regime there.
Alexander Gabuyev, director of the Carnegie Center for Russia and Eurasia, said that the war in Ukraine has drained Russia’s resources, which are no longer able to withstand Western pressure and no longer have enough resources to achieve its ambitions, which means it cannot fight a war against the United States in defense of Venezuela.
Russia is also taking into account the power of US President Trump to influence the situation in Russia, Ukraine, and Europe in general, especially since Washington is still providing the Ukrainian military with intelligence and weapons.
From another strategic perspective, Moscow sees US intervention in Venezuela as paving the way for the wresting of Greenland from Denmark, which threatens the future of NATO, which was founded in 1949 after World War II as a US-led alliance in Europe to counter Moscow’s influence.
President Putin has been seeking for years to create a division between the United States and its longtime NATO allies because it would give Russia greater influence in Europe, having lost control of much of the old continent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
