Moscow strengthens its relationship with Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, in the 'near abroad' of the U.S.

• Putin's military display in Caracas: sending bombers (December 2018), special forces (January 2019) and a hundred military personnel (March 2019).

• The head of the US Southern Command denounces "not benign" purposes of the Police School opened by Russia in Managua for the training Central American agents.

• The agreement to install a Glonass station in Cuba revives suspicions that the Russians may again use the island for spying on the US as in the Cold War.

▲ Venezuelan defense minister's reception of two Russian bombers at Maiquetia airport, December 2018 [RT broadcast].

report SRA 2019 / Irene Isabel Maspons [PDF Version] [PDF Version].

APRIL 2019-In recent years Latin America has become an increasingly strategic arena for Vladimir Putin's Russia. Although it is not the Kremlin's main area of attention, its calculated moves in the area allow it to gain influence on the southern flank of the United States. Since 2006 Russia has increased its interests in the region, taking as an incentive the lesser attention of the US towards the rest of the continent due to the change of priorities implied by 9/11 in 2001 and taking advantage of the appearance since then of leftist populist governments, in a political cycle inaugurated with the arrival of Hugo Chavez to power.

Russia's relationship has been special with the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) countries -Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia-, particularly with the first three, as this allows it to geopolitically confront the United States in the Caribbean, as the USSR did in its day. Being one of the main arms producing countries, Russia has also sold arms to other Latin American countries, but in addition to a commercial attention , in the case of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba a strategic relationship has been established.

The ties with these three nations have grown closer in the last year: the latest major crisis in Venezuela has made this country even more dependent on Moscow; the presidential and constitutional change in Cuba has led Havana to secure the Russian sponsorship in this time of complicated transition, while Russia's activity in Nicaragua has raised the Pentagon's public alert.

The fact that since last fall the United States has been referring to Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua as the "axis of evil" in the Western Hemisphere is precisely due to the perception in Washington of increased Russian activity in the region. If the last decade marked the "return" of Russia to the Caribbean, 2018 saw the "return" of the United States to a policy of priority attention to what is happening in that geographical area, precisely because of the increased activity of Russia, and also of China. Moscow is showing the US (and its allies) that it can be reciprocal in the face of the pressure it is receiving in its own near abroad, as highlighted by a recent report of the Elcano Institute, and Washington has begun to answer those moves.

On the other hand, 2018 was an election year in a good issue of countries. The White House warned of the possibility that Moscow wanted to interfere especially in Mexico, to propitiate the election of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, considering him uncomfortable for the US. Although in small volumes, Mexico is Russia's second largest commercial partner in Latin America, after Brazil, and the second largest buyer of Russian arms, far behind Venezuela (the third country is Peru). However, there was no evidence of particular Russian activity in these or other Latin American elections. There is evidence, however, that Russian capabilities for the dissemination of fake news in the Spanish-speaking globosphere have counted on the financial aid of Venezuelan networks.

Venezuela

Russia's influence in Venezuela in the last year has been visible in various aspects. To follow a temporal order, it is worth mentioning the launch of the Petro cryptocurrency, presented in February 2018 as a form of digital cash supposedly linked to the value of Venezuela's oil reserves. A research conducted by Time magazine revealed that Russian businessmen had acted as advisors to the Government of Nicolás Maduro for the launch of the Petro, although the Russian Ministry of Finance denied that Moscow authorities were involved in the initiative. With the creation of this virtual currency, Maduro hoped to have a mechanism to evade the sanctions decreed by the United States against Venezuelan bonds and PDVSA. If there was a Russian interest, it could have been to take advantage of the Petro to evade some of the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and the European Union, although the Petro soon proved its uselessness as a financial vehicle.

With the worsening of the status in Venezuela -from the presidential elections advanced to May 2018, whose result was not recognized by a large issue of countries, to the consequences of the swearing-in of Juan Guairó in January 2019 as legitimate president of the country-, Russian military elements have staged a show of support for Maduro. In December, two Tupolev-160 strategic bombers landed at Maiquetia airport as part of alleged joint maneuvers between the two countries. The following month, Reuters reported the presence in Venezuela of private military contractors arrived from Russia, belonging to the private company Wagner, which has provided various services to the Kremlin. In March 2019, two cargo planes of the Russian Ministry of Defense unloaded in Maiquetia a hundred military personnel, with General Vasily Tonkoshkurov, head of staff of the Army, at the head and 35 tons of various unspecified military equipment, which allegedly could have been destined for the implementation of the anti-aircraft protection of the area of Caracas.

In 2018 Russia continued, with its credit policy, to take positions in the Venezuelan oil and mining sectors. Although the $17 billion that Russia has given in credit to Venezuela since 2006 - mostly for the purchase of Russian armaments - lag far behind the $67.2 million granted by China since 2007 in exchange for oil in the future, the fact is that the Kremlin has become in the last couple of years a major supporter of the Maduro regime: in 2016 China lowered to $2.200 million dollars its loans to Venezuela and granted none in 2017; only at the end of 2018 it returned to previous volumes, with a credit of 5 billion dollars. In contrast Russia has been very actively aiding the Venezuelan energy sector through Rosneft, which in 2016 took as collateral for a loan with 49% of the shares of Citgo, PDVSA's subsidiary and one of the Venezuelan state-owned company's major assets. In 2017 Russia agreed to refinance US$3.15 billion of the debt contracted by Venezuela, delaying almost all payments until 2023.

The last commitment took place at the meeting that Putin and Maduro held in December in Novo Ogaryovo, the Russian presidential residency program on the outskirts of Moscow. At its conclusion, Maduro announced that meeting had "guaranteed" an oil investment of more than 5 billion dollars and contracts for more than 1 billion dollars for the exploitation of gold", thus expanding the portfolio of Russian interests in the Caribbean country to that precious metal as well.

On the other hand, in March 2019 Maduro ordered the transfer of PDVSA's office for Europe from Lisbon to Moscow, with the goal to avoid its confiscation in view of the recognition progressively obtained by Juan Guaidó as president in European countries.

Nicaragua

Part of the U.S. alert expressed in the last year about Russia's increasing activity in the region ran to position from the Pentagon. In his February 2018 appearance before the congress , the then head of the Southern Command, Admiral Kurt W. Tidd, already conveyed U.S. concern about the increased presence of Russia and China in areas of the Americas of strategic interest to Washington. That complaint took on greater specificity in the following annual appearance on Capitol Hill by his successor, Admiral Craig S. Faller, who in his February 2019 speech indicated that Russia is using the region "to disseminate information, gather intelligence on the United States and project power." In an interview then granted to Voice of America, Faller referred, among other specifics, to several Russian initiatives in Nicaragua.

The Southern Command chief placed special emphasis on the training Professional Police Center that Russia has built and runs in Nicaragua, inaugurated in October 2017 and intended for the training of Central American police officers in the fight against drugs and organized crime. "I don't know what other purposes that center might serve, but I'm sure they are not all naive and benign," Faller said.

Already in 2017 it was reported that around two hundred Russian military personnel rotate their presence in Nicaragua, garrisoned mostly at the Puerto Sandino military facility on the Pacific coast, which for all practical purposes functions as a Russian base.

Faller's warnings about intelligence gathering in the region by Russia have to do to some extent with a satellite station installed by Russia in Managua, a short distance from the U.S. Embassy. Since 2013, Russia has stationed four stations of its Glonass positioning system in Latin America: four stations are in Brazil and in 2017 one Nicaragua was installed. Unlike the stations in Brazil, which are managed with transparency and easy access, the one built in Managua is surrounded by secrecy and this has generated doubts about its real use, and it could be an installation intended for eavesdropping.

In May 2018, the scientific-industrial corporation High Precision Equipment Manufacturing Systems (SPP, for its acronym in Russian) reported having signed a contract to site a measurement station for the Glonass navigation system in Cuba.

Cuba

That last advertisement gave rise to new rumors about the possibility of Russia reactivating the Lourdes base in Cuba, which during the Cold War had great resources as a signals intelligence center for U.S. espionage. Moscow has so far denied that there are any such projects. On the other hand, it has expressed the desire to have a military base in Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua, as the Russian Ministry of Defense itself has suggested on some occasions, but these plans have not been officially put into practice.

In 2018, relations between Havana and Moscow became institutionally closer, with the first visit of a Cuban president to Russia in almost a decade. The replacement of Raúl Castro by Miguel Díaz-Canel led both countries to stage their mutual commitment in the face of Western expectations about political changes on the island. A few months before that visit, both countries signed several agreements for the partnership in areas such as the steel industry, sports and customs services, while betting on strengthening the bilateral partnership , trade and investments of the Eurasian country in the island.

As a result of the serious Venezuelan crisis, in May 2017 Russia resumed the submission of significant quantities of oil to Cuba, as it had done decades ago, in order now to compensate for the reduction of crude oil sent by Venezuela. In a first agreement, Rosneft committed to supply 250,000 tons of oil and refined products, although it is not stated for how long and it was possibly a temporary or intermittent aid.