Putin will feel Maduro’s loss more than most
Vladimir Putin is fast losing friends. Nicolás Maduro, once a stalwart ally, is led beshackled into a Manhattan courthouse.
Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who once provided a warm water port to the Russian navy, is stuck with his family in Moscow exile. According to intelligence reports he might soon be joined by the ailing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader. Putin was unable to save Maduro from humiliation by Donald Trump, unable to prevent the Butcher of Damascus being ousted by an ex-jihadist and unable to head off US and Israeli forces crippling much of Iran’s nuclear programme.
The fact is the autumn of Putin the patriarch is looking pretty wintry.
His hopes for a Red Sea naval base in Port Sudan? Put on hold by the embattled Sudanese government.
Russia has been swept out of the Transcaucasus; his long-standing Chechen ally Ramzan Kadyrov is seriously ill; in central Asia tensions are flaring with Kazakhstan. And on the Ukrainian war front the embarrassing gap between what he promised Russian citizens and his actual territorial gains since 2022 does not reflect well on his war leadership.
The Trump raid on Caracas — and his quick promise to upgrade the country’s oil infrastructure — will eventually bring more crude on to an oversupplied market, push prices down and place Putin under serious pressure. Urals crude has already dropped below $50 a barrel. Russian and Venezuelan crude is currently being sold at just under $40 a barrel.
That will tear a hole in the Russian budget.
The US attack on Venezuela also highlighted the problem of countries that rely on Russian air defences. In Israel’s war against Iran, it has regularly destroyed Russian-supplied S-300 missiles. Last year Maduro boasted that Venezuela had 5,000 Igla-S low-altitude anti-aircraft missiles at its disposal. His bragging was supposed to signal that he could withstand any US attack and the Trump administration would think twice about starting World War Three. In fact a combination of realtime intelligence, electronic warfare and precision weapons demonstrated how much the Russian arms industry lags behind the US. Little surprise then that Putin has been a no-show in this crisis. His weakness saps the idea of a Russian-led collective security group, the garde du corps of anti-western autocrats everywhere.
The bear hunter could at the end of his bloody career become the prey
The question then is whether he will go in a similar way to the leaders who once placed their faith in him.
Technically he can serve one more six-year term after the current one, until 2036, when he can at the age of 83 hang up his height-boosting block heeled boots and go fishing. He will have served longer than Josef Stalin.
A generation has come to political maturity since he first took power; they know only a single leader and know any serious attempt to oppose him ends fatally.
The result is that great swathes of the population are depoliticised.
Polling by the Levada Center shows about 20 per cent are supportive of Putin, about 20 per cent dislike Putin and his war on Ukraine. A great chunk in the middle tell pollsters things like, “it’s out of my hands”, “the West is Russophobic” and “we must stand together in time of war”.
That gives a media-controlling dictator an easy ride.
For an exhausted and distracted Russian population there is no such thing as a bad peace; victory over Ukraine is a matter of deft packaging by Putin’s sales team. In this scenario — an incomplete settlement with Ukraine that builds in a strong chance of future wars — Putin may feel he has a free ride for a decade.
His dream perhaps is that Vladimir Putin will be succeeded by a candidate who embraces Putinism — the assertion of Russian values, an all-seeing security state, a more prosperous society. But can Putinism flourish if the man himself keeps repeating his own mistakes, rejecting advice from outside the bubble? In 2000, before taking power, Putin was asked which leaders he found “most interesting”. First he named Napoleon Bonaparte and then chuckled, aware that Bonapartism is frowned upon by the Left. He settled on Charles de Gaulle and it quickly became apparent why: the Algerians took advantage to press for full independence after seeing French humiliation in the Second World War. Putin’s first challenge was to crush independence-minded Chechens exploiting the break-up of the Soviet Union.
The battle to retain power can lead to the disintegration of the political class, an unrelenting fight against challengers for meagre, watertreading gains. If faced with a choice between a constant cycle of purging and defenestrating opponents and a secure exile disguised as retirement, a worn-out leader with a stash of stolen cash could opt for the latter.
The supposedly easy option, though, also masks danger.
As the Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski has pointed out, exile for leaders isn’t just displacement, it brings moral isolation. It cuts off ex-leaders from the mental machinery that turned past crimes into “necessities”. Refuge becomes confinement. Exile promises a passage to safety but, as Assad is discovering in Moscow, safety that puts security men in front of your bedroom door does not bring peace.
If, as is being mooted behind the scenes, Maduro is convicted in the US and is then swapped for prisoners from Russia, he too will struggle with debilitating loss of power. Of course, Putin would have to find a country of refuge that agrees not to extradite him to a war crimes tribunal. The passionate bearhunter could at the end of his bloody career become the prey.
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