RUSSIA UPS THE ANTE IN VENEZUELA
Why Russia Just Sent Troops to Venezuela: Alex Ward, VOX, Mar. 27, 2019 — Russia recently sent two military planes full of troops and equipment to Venezuela. It’s a move that could provoke a strong response from the United States and potentially plunge the South American nation into further chaos.
How Trump Should Counter Putin in Ukraine and Venezuela: Dr. Jiri Valenta, BESA, March 18, 2019 — Russian president Vladimir Putin appears to be counting on a lack of American resolve regarding Venezuela. If Washington abdicates its role in Venezuela, Russia will eventually build intelligence facilities there. Moscow is already providing Nicaragua with “sophisticated weaponry,” including “T-72 tanks, war boats, warplanes, and powerful bombs.”
Venezuela: Narco-State Meets Iran-Backed Terror: Emanuele Ottolenghi and John Hannah, Jewish Policy Center, Winter 2018 — As if the political and economic chaos wracking Venezuela wasn’t worrying enough, a couple of recent stories underscore the potential national security threat brewing there. First, last February’s designation of Venezuela’s vice president, Tareck El Aissami, as a drug kingpin by the U.S. Department of Treasury.
The Middle Eastern Origins of Support for Venezuela’s Maduro: Seth J. Frantzman, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 24, 2019 — Support for competing sides in Venezuela’s latest crisis has divided the world – and has its origins in differences over Middle Eastern politics.
ON TOPIC LINKS:
Experts See Israel’s Support for Venezuela’s Guaidó as a ‘Win-Win’: Israel Kasnett, Jewish Journal, Feb. 5, 2019 – A nation can tell that it’s on the wrong side of an international issue when a group like Hezbollah is on its side.
Venezuela’s Guaido Says He is Working to Restore Ties with Israel: Reuters, Feb. 12, 2019 — Venezuela’s self-declared leader Juan Guaido says he was working to restore ties with Israel that Caracas cut off a decade ago in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Venezuela in Crisis: Iran’s Poisonous Role: Joseph M. Humire, Middle East Forum, March 2, 2019, Video — Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela is fortified by Russian mercenaries, Cuban paramilitary elements, Hezbollah, and Iranian Basij and Quds Force operatives.
Get China and Russia Out of Venezuela – and the Western Hemisphere: Gordon G. Chang, Gatestone Institute, Feb. 8, 2019 — “What are our national security interests in Venezuela?” Adam Smith, the Washington Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, asked Erin Burnett on January 29 during her CNN primetime show.
WHY RUSSIA JUST SENT TROOPS TO VENEZUELA
Alex Ward
VOX, Mar. 27, 2019
Russia recently sent two military planes full of troops and equipment to Venezuela. It’s a move that could provoke a strong response from the United States and potentially plunge the South American nation into further chaos. Around 100 Russians landed outside of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, with unidentified equipment on Saturday. It’s not entirely clear why they’ve arrived now, although some fear they’ve come to help Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro fend off a US-led attempt to depose him. While Russia has in the past sent a few advisers to Venezuela, 100 is more than normal, CBS News reported.
Other experts and US government officials, though, say Russia is merely trying to protect diplomatic and other staff in Venezuela as well as perform maintenance on their military equipment in the country. In other words, the 100 or so Russians are in Venezuela to help themselves, not Maduro.
But US officials and experts remain vigilant, mainly because there’s a small fear that Moscow might intervene militarily in Venezuela’s crisis like it did in Syria. Since January, the Trump administration, joined by governments in Latin America and Europe, has called for Maduro to step down, partly because the country has suffered from an economic collapse and humanitarian crisis during his rule. The US and others now recognize Guaidó, the leader of the country’s opposition-controlled legislative body, as Venezuela’s rightful president.
Russia didn’t take kindly to that. “Destructive interference from abroad blatantly violates basic norms of international law,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin (the same leader who orchestrated the annexation of Crimea) on January 24. And while the Kremlin insists it has a right to send Russian troops to Venezuela, the US isn’t happy about it. According to the State Department, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a March 25 call that America “will not stand idly by as Russia exacerbates tensions in Venezuela.”
“The continued insertion of Russian military personnel to support [Maduro] risks prolonging the suffering of the Venezuelan people,” the call readout continued. And on Wednesday, seated alongside Guaidó’s wife in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump said, “Russia has to get out” of Venezuela.
All of which raises the question: Why would Russia risk inciting US anger over Venezuela? It turns out there are two key reasons. The Trump administration says it’s trying to remove Maduro because of his horrid mismanagement of the country. Some critics believe the main reason, among others, is that Trump wants to make his fight against socialists a wedge issue in the 2020 presidential election. The US focus on Venezuela, long a target of anti-socialists in the United States, has led it into a small-scale proxy war with Russia.
At first glance, it seems odd that Moscow, which recently has spent so much time trying to wield influence in Europe and the Middle East, cares so much about a Latin American country. But it turns out that Venezuela has been a top concern of Russia’s for decades.
The first reason is allying so closely with Venezuela gives it a firm foothold in the United States’ hemisphere. Russia, especially under Putin, has designs to become a top global player. Wielding a lot of influence in South America, then, is one way to do that and possibly curb Washington’s power in the process.
Russia built and maintained its friendship with Venezuela by getting close to the country’s socialist leadership, which has been in power since the 1990s. That makes the US-led effort to remove Maduro so troubling for Moscow: If Maduro leaves and Guaidó takes his place, then Venezuela may become more friendly with the US than with Russia. “Were Venezuela ever to fall from the Russian orbit, it would be very painful for the Kremlin,” Vladimir Rouvinski, an expert on Russia-Venezuela relations at Colombia’s University of Cali, wrote in a February report for the Wilson Center in Washington. “Moscow is trying hard to prevent this from happening.”
The second reason is purely about economics. Venezuela has bought billions in Russian military equipment, to the point that nearly all of its modern-day arsenal comes from Russia. Moscow certainly doesn’t want to lose such a prominent customer. But the real economic links center on oil… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
HOW TRUMP SHOULD COUNTER PUTIN IN UKRAINE AND VENEZUELA
Dr. Jiri Valenta
BESA, March 18, 2019
Russian president Vladimir Putin appears to be counting on a lack of American resolve regarding Venezuela. If Washington abdicates its role in Venezuela, Russia will eventually build intelligence facilities there. Moscow is already providing Nicaragua with “sophisticated weaponry,” including “T-72 tanks, war boats, warplanes, and powerful bombs.”
America is facing two dangerous crises. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, the illegitimate winner of a reportedly sham election, has, through his socialist policies, created a catastrophe. The struggle between his challenger, Juan Guaidó, and himself is reaching a crescendo. Millions of Venezuelans, suffering under Maduro’s radical regime, have been flooding neighboring Brazil and Colombia. Yet, with the help of President Putin, Maduro is clinging to power, just as Fidel Castro did in the early 1960s with the aid of Nikita Khrushchev.
Putin, seeking to rescue his beleaguered client as well as his considerable investments in Venezuelan oil and gold, recently deployed two nuclear-capable bombers to Venezuela. In addition, hundreds of “private military contractors who do secret missions for Russia” are reportedly deployed in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan crisis is linked to a second dangerous crisis: that of eastern Ukraine. There, even as US ships recently sailed through the Black Sea, Putin is undertaking a new destabilization policy directed at the strategically important eastern Ukrainian industrial city of Mariupol.
Why Mariupol? Putin’s main objective seems to be to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the EU. His strategy is also likely designed to weaken Ukraine, which depends on the export of coal, steel, and grain through Mariupol, which is the key export port for the whole Donbas region. A railroad hub and the key port on the Azov Sea, Mariupol could also serve as a land bridge to Crimea.
Putin appears to have become militarily involved in Venezuela partly to ensure that Ukraine, the most geopolitically significant country on its western borders, will not follow the path of the Baltic NATO countries. He apparently desires that Ukraine will become a weak nation that will eventually reach some sort of economic cooperation with Russia. A believer in warfare by proxies on land – separatists, “volunteers,” Chechens, and Special Forces – Putin is now using the Russian Navy and Special Forces by sea to strangle Mariupol.
Even if Russia does not have a master plan, it does appear to have strategic objectives: building a network of naval and air force facilities, as in Syria; or renewing them, as in Crimea and occupied Abkhazia. Russia would love to once again possess the port in Mariupol and dominate the Azov Sea.
What can President Trump do in the face of these two crises?
Putin’s evolving strategy and the Venezuelan and Ukrainian crises
Vladimir Putin has never sought to recover the whole Soviet or Tsarist empires. Rather, for more than a decade, he has concentrated on strategically important slices of countries that were part of the former empire – primarily those with sizable populations of Russian speakers, Orthodox believers, or Shiite supporters of Christians.
More importantly, Putin’s aims differ from those of former premiers Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who conducted expensive full occupations of landlocked countries, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan. Putin appears to be seeking littoral slices of countries with assets he considers strategically valuable for Russia. The slices he seems to favor are those linked to the south by strategic waterways and endowed with energy resources. Now, with ISIS helpfully cleaned out of Syria by the US, Russia has a warm water port on the Mediterranean, gas fields, and – ever since President Obama effectively abandoned Syria – the opportunity for Russia to displace or control Syrian leaders, such as Bashar Assad… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
VENEZUELA: NARCO-STATE MEETS IRAN-BACKED TERROR
Emanuele Ottolenghi and John Hannah
Jewish Policy Center, Winter 2018
As if the political and economic chaos wracking Venezuela wasn’t worrying enough, a couple of recent stories underscore the potential national security threat brewing there. First, last February’s designation of Venezuela’s vice president, Tareck El Aissami, as a drug kingpin by the U.S. Department of Treasury. Second, a CNN investigative report revealing that Venezuela’s embassy in Iraq was allegedly selling Venezuelan passports and identity documents to Middle Eastern nationals. The CNN report doubled down on revelations that the Venezuelan embassy in Syria had engaged in similar activities in 2013, when a key Hezbollah liaison in Venezuela, the Treasury-sanctioned and FBI-wanted Ghazi Atef Nassereddine, was the deputy ambassador in Damascus. If true, such reckless action would almost certainly facilitate the entry of Islamist militants to Latin America. Put all this together and what do you get? A rabidly anti-American failed state that is aggressively incubating the convergence of narco-trafficking and jihadism in America’s own backyard.
Venezuela’s links to the drug trade are deep and well documented. In 2009, for example, the U.S. Department of Treasury sanctioned Venezuelan national, Walid Makled Garcia, under the Kingpin Act for drug trafficking. Makled was eventually arrested in Colombia and extradited to Venezuela, where he stood trial. According to the February 2017 Treasury designation of Vice President El Aissami, Makled’s cocaine shipments enjoyed the protection of the vice president, who received payments from Makled in exchange for facilitating the shipments. These included shipments to the United States. During his trial, Makled claimed to have bribed and worked with the highest echelons of the Venezuelan state to keep his cocaine business running smoothly.
Subsequent cases showed that Venezuelan collusion with the cartels reaches the highest levels of the state. Two nephews of President Nicolas Maduro were arrested in Haiti and convicted on drug trafficking charges by a federal jury in Manhattan in November 2016. General Néstor Luis Reverol Torres – Venezuela’s current minister of interior and justice, and former head of its national anti-narcotics agency – was indicted in the United States last August on cocaine trafficking charges, along with a former captain in Venezuela’s National Guard. The list of officials implicated in narco-trafficking also includes a former minister of interior and justice, two senior intelligence officers who later became governors, and now Vice President El Aissami.
The country’s economy is a seemingly endless downward spiral, yet the regime retains control. That’s partly because of the collusion of officials at the highest levels of power with drug cartels, whose limitless financial resources keep Maduro and his cronies afloat.
The implications for Washington are extremely damaging and not simply in terms of the drugs and violence flowing across the southern border. In El Aissami’s case, five of the 13 entities sanctioned were Miami-based LLC’s. Their illicit activity compromises the integrity of the U.S. financial system.
Of no less concern is Venezuela’s long history of collaboration with Iran, including sanctions evasion, terror finance, and ideological subversion. During the presidencies of Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Caracas was a key facilitator of Tehran’s sanctions-busting efforts. The two regimes established business ventures and financial institutions in Venezuela, which they used to launder Iranian money, procure technology, and bribe senior Venezuelan officials.
Cooperation did not stop at banking and business. Caracas also helped Tehran promote virulent anti-Americanism across Latin America. Indeed, Venezuela has increasingly become a center for Iran’s revolutionary agitation in the Western Hemisphere.
In 2004, Tehran established the Centro de Intercambio Cultural Iran LatinoAmerica, or CICIL, in Caracas. CICIL is run by Islam Oriente, a foundation based in the Iranian religious center of Qom and headed by Mohsen Rabbani – the Iranian cleric implicated in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. Rabbani’s emissaries use Venezuela as a forward operating base for their Latin American activities, which include exporting the Iranian revolution, radicalizing local Muslims, helping Hezbollah consolidate its foothold among Western Hemisphere Lebanese communities, and linking to social and political movements that share Iran’s anti-American agenda. Iran’s missionary work in Latin America has often been downplayed as either innocuous or ineffective. Yet recent revelations about the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires have exposed a collusion between Argentina’s former president, Kristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the Iranian regime to cover up Tehran’s and Hezbollah’s role in the terror attack. Iran’s Argentina-based intermediaries all have links to Rabbani’s missionary network. Some of them have been arrested, while the former president, as of this writing, is facing an arrest warrant for her role in the alleged cover-up…[To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
THE MIDDLE EASTERN ORIGINS OF SUPPORT FOR VENEZUELA’S MADURO
Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 24, 2019
Support for competing sides in Venezuela’s latest crisis has divided the world – and has its origins in differences over Middle Eastern politics. On January 23, the US recognized Juan Guaidó as the interim President of Venezuela, even as the regime of President Nicolas Maduro continues to hold the mantle of power in Caracas. Turkey has offered some of the strongest support for Maduro yet. “Maduro brother, stand tall, Turkey stands with you,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Maduro in a recent phone call.
Guaidó declared himself president as massive crowds converged in Venezuela’s capital to protest Maduro’s rule on Wednesday. The US has taken the lead in supporting Guaidó, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Washington will conduct relations with the new president and no longer recognizes Maduro, who has been president since 2013, when he assumed power from Hugo Chazev, the former coup leader turned strongman who came to power in the 2002 elections.
Maduro’s supporters claim he was reelected in May 2018, but the opposition and many countries did not recognize the outcome of those elections, paving the way for the current crisis. Iran, Syria, Turkey and Russia all recognized the 2018 results.
Support for Maduro has divided the world and South America, where Colombia, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and others have recognized Guaidó, while Mexico, Cuba and Bolivia have stood with Maduro. Russia and China have condemned the US decision to interfere in Venezuelan politics. However, in the Middle East, the Venezuela divide is interesting because Iran, Turkey and Russia – who have grown increasingly close over the Syrian conflict – all support Maduro.
IRAN’S FOREIGN ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi backed Maduro and condemned “foreign meddling in the country’s domestic affairs,” insinuating that a coup was under way. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that the US and Latin American countries were intervening in the internal affairs of Venezuela. Under Chavez, Venezuela has become a key ally of regimes in the Middle East that oppose the US and Israel, such as Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was so close to Chavez that he got in trouble in his own media for hugging Chavez’s mother and reportedly saying in 2013 that Chavez would be resurrected alongside Jesus.
In 2014, Maduro attacked Israel and Jews in a march “against genocide,” claiming that “the Jews that live in our lands” should be the first to condemn Israel. He claimed that Israel doesn’t kill Palestinians in error, but intentionally murders them.
Unsurprisingly, Maduro’s statements have been given a place in Turkish nationalist media, such as the newspaper Yeni Safak, which put up a speech by Maduro in 2017 titled “Jews, stop murderous Israel.” This dovetails with extremist statements by the far Right in Turkey, which has accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians and frequently bashes Israel for its actions.
The Palestinian Authority has supported Maduro in the current crisis, which comes as the US is withdrawing funding from the Palestinians and the PA refuses to meet with the US on any peace deals…[To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
