‘Closing his eyes’: Why is Russia’s Putin quiet on US abduction of Maduro?

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A meme has gone viral on Russian social media networks with a quote from President Vladimir Putin, “We don’t give up on our own,” placed next to his photos with the leaders he once declared Moscow’s “key allies”.

There were Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who was toppled and killed in 2011, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who was toppled and fled to Moscow in 2024, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, who was toppled and rushed to Moscow in 2014.

‘Putin’s prestige and reputation suffered a blow’

The consequences for Russia are two-pronged, observers told Al Jazeera.

There is immediate damage to the Kremlin’s already-tarnished international reputation but long-term benefits for Moscow’s insistence on having carte blanche in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, including energy-rich Central Asia.

“On the one hand, Putin’s prestige and reputation suffered a blow as Maduro was his most loyal ally in Latin America,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera. “Far more important to Putin is that with his actions, Trump is establishing a new world order.”

But this ally’s value cannot possibly outweigh the importance of a new world order that US President Donald Trump is establishing, he said.

“And this new world order is now based on the priority of force, not on the international law whose cornerstone was the sovereignty of nations,” he said.

What happened with Maduro resembles Moscow’s military inaction after al-Assad’s panicked flight from Damascus to Moscow in December 2024 during the takeover of Syria by opposition forces.

One theory is that Trump and Putin wrote Maduro off during their August summit in Anchorage, Alaska.

“Perhaps in Anchorage or even earlier, there was a conversation about the limitation of spheres of interest in the world,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russia researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

The agreement may have included concessions from Trump on Ukraine for the sake of future, post-war joint development of hydrocarbons in Russia’s Arctic regions while Washington gains control over Greenland.

“Trump’s persistent desire to take over Greenland is made from the same cloth,” Mitrokhin said. “From there, he’d want to control the northern part of ‘his part of the world’.”

And after Russia’s existing oilfields are tapped out, US companies could also be instrumental in the development of the Bazhenovska Svita, the world’s largest shale oil deposits in the swampy plains of western Siberia.

US oil companies pioneered the extraction of shale oil and gas while Russian firms lack the technologies and expertise.

Control over Bazhenovska Svita would help the White House kill a much bigger geopolitical bird with the same stone.

“The United States needs Bazhenovska Svita to prevent China from getting there as it could form Beijing’s energy independence,” Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.

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’s “imperialism”, he said.

‘Putin will not get closer to Trump’

Another expert said giving up on Maduro will not help Putin to mend ties with Trump right away.

On Monday, Trump said he “didn’t believe” Putin’s claim that Ukraine had tried to kill the Russian president at his Valdai residence in northwestern Russia in late December.

“By closing his eyes on Maduro’s capture, Putin will not get closer to Trump,” Galiya Ibragimova, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, told Al Jazeera.

“Putin is most frightened by the fact that in Maduro’s coterie, there was a person who leaked information to Americans, and now Putin – with his paranoid conviction that everyone is after him – will firstly boost his own security,” she said.

Maduro’s “extraction” may even inspire Putin to plan the kidnapping of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she said.

At the dawn of his presidency in the early 2000s, Putin developed ties with Maduro’s socialist predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez despite Moscow’s growing political tilt to rightward nationalism.

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.

Russian experts played a key role in Venezuela’s economic lifeline – the processing of heavy, hard-to-extract crude.

However, their outdated technologies could not possibly prevent the decline in Venezuela’s crude production, which helped cause a years-long economic nosedive, hyperinflation and brain drain of oil experts from geologists to engineers.

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 “eternal friendship”.

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 “logistical support”, The Washington Post reported.

He also asked for a “financing plan”, the newspaper said, adding that it was not clear whether Moscow replied to the plea.

Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin voices present Maduro’s fall as part of an anti-Moscow plan that will certainly “fail.”

“We simply have to fathom that the collective West will never give up on its attempts to defeat Russia,” analyst Kirill Strelnikov wrote in an opinion piece for the RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday. “You can try – and will fall from far above and painfully.”

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