The Venezuela Raid Has Russian Heads Spinning

The reaction from the Russian press has been amusingly muddled and self-contradictory.

Sergei Karnaukhov (Screenshot via YouTube)

WHEN AMERICAN SPECIAL FORCES descended on Caracas to grab Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bring them to the United States to face criminal charges, much of the Russian propaganda machine happened to be on vacation. The notorious talk shows on the country’s federal channels, such as “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” and “60 Minutes” on Rossiya-1, “Time Will Tell” on Channel One, and “Meeting Place” on NTV, are on holiday hiatus from late December until next week. (The timing has to do with Russian Orthodox Christmas, which falls on January 7.) As a result, the big guns have been quiet, leaving podcasts and social media to fill the punditry gap with a revealing mixture of embarrassment, envy, indignity, and confusion.

Putin’s pet propagandists are so used to defending the indefensible—alternately decrying and enforcing double standards and automatically demonizing the United States—that when the Trump administration did something of questionable legality with Putinesque justifications, they couldn’t decide what to think. Besides, they’re still not quite settled on whether Trump is a friend or an enemy.

The national channels were limited to regular news coverage, which never comes without a dose of commentary on Russian television. But that commentary, notes expatriate Russian journalist Ilya Shepelin, has been oddly tentative, suggesting that the Kremlin is still getting its talking points figured out.

Channel One initially compared the Venezuela raid to the war in Iraq and U.S. intervention in Libya, with the anchor sarcastically noting, “The world is observing yet another demonstration of American power with no regard for the international law Washington is so fond of citing.” Later, the focus shifted to the hypocrisy of Europeans, who were failing to condemn U.S. aggression, and to pro-Maduro protests, which a Rossiya-1 news host claimed had “swept across dozens of countries” from Latin America to Southeast Asia. (No mention was made of anti-Maduro rallies, including ones by rejoicing Venezuelan exiles.)

Podcasters, a degree removed from the government propagandists, were far bolder in lashing out at American villainy. In a January 5 discussion on Radio Komsomolskaya Pravda, host Mikhail Shakhnazarov was especially incensed by the Americans’ “scummy”—and since-debunked—destruction of the mausoleum housing the remains of Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. (For good measure, Shakhnazarov asserted that Chávez, a socialist who died of cancer in 2013, was killed with a “cancer virus” by “globalists” because he was “conservative to the bone”; someone get this guy on Tucker Carlson’s podcast.)

Another podcaster from the same outlet, ultranationalist activist and “journalist” Nikolai Starikov, saw a sinister link between Maduro’s removal and the supposed Ukrainian drone attack on Vladimir Putin’s residence near the town of Valdai: “Here, they abducted the President; meanwhile, our President was targeted by an attempted assassination.” (The CIA assessed that the supposed drone attack on Putin’s retreat didn’t happen.) Oddly, Starikov saw evidence of American weakness in the fact that the U.S. military simply “went in and grabbed one man” instead of launching a full-scale assault on Venezuela. Apparently, losing around a million dead and wounded soldiers while failing to abduct a foreign leader is a sign of strength.

Other Russian propagandists saw the lessons of Trump’s “special operation” in Venezuela very differently. Hours after the raid, RT’s infamous Margarita Simonyan made an enigmatic social media post roughly translatable as, “We’ll be watching with envy, Comrade Beria.”

The reference is to an old, probably apocryphal anecdote in which Soviet secret police chief Lavrenty Beria reports to Stalin that a Red Army marshal, a married man, is carrying on a scandalous affair with a famous stage actress and asks if anything should be done about it. Stalin thinks a moment, puffs on his pipe, and replies, “What are we going to do? Watch and envy!” The point, clearly, was that Russia could only envy America’s operation in Venezuela for being quick, clean, and bloodless (at least, for Americans).

Many of Russia’s war-hawk bloggers, who don’t toe the Kremlin line nearly as much as the official media, were grudgingly open about their envy. “This really was a model special military operation, with limited goals and involvement,” a blogger using the nickname “Military Informer” wrote on Telegram. “They flew in, their did the job, they flew out.” Another pro-war Telegram channel, “Dva Maiora” (“Two Majors”), wrote that, “without excessive reverence for the pindosy” (the go-to Russian slur for Americans), “they did a competent job” and added that Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine was probably intended to be just as swift and efficient: “Surely [Chief of the General Staff Valery] Gerasimov wasn’t planning to fight a war for four years.” Another prominent war blogger, Yuri Kotenok, suggested that the U.S. forces were “copying the actions of the Russian army’s special units in Hostomel in 2022, in the early hours of the special operation.” Oh yes, the battle in which Russian special units lost 200–300 men and failed to seize the Hostomel airport near Kyiv: definitely a model for Delta Force to copy.

The humiliation of the Russian “patriots” was compounded by the fact that Maduro had been a Russian client and a received billions from Kremlin coffers—not to mention Russian air defense systems, which apparently were barely an obstacle for U.S. airpower. (And then it was compounded again on Wednesday by the U.S. seizure of a previously sanctioned Venezuela-linked oil tanker rebranded under a Russian flag.)

Perhaps no one suffered as much of an embarrassment as Sergei Karnaukhov, who hosts a program on Vladimir Solovyov’s web channel Solovyov Live. On December 4, Karnaukhov soliloquized on the wisdom of Maduro’s choice to ally himself with Russia, which guaranteed that Trump wouldn’t dare touch him: “He understands that you simply can’t mess with us anymore . . . those times are gone.” Karnaukhov asserted that the Kremlin simply “made a decision and didn’t allow the Americans to blow up Venezuela.”

Fast-forward to January 3, and a chastened Karnaukhov was decrying American intransigence (“If Russia stands in their way, they’ll crush us too, or at least try”), lamenting the United Nations’ feeble response to American aggression, and sighing that one Russian ally after another—Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, Syria’s Bashar Assad, now Venezuela’s Maduro—was falling from power. The next day, when a Telegram blogger made a mocking post about Karnaukhov’s reflections on Maduro’s safety under Russian protection, Karnaukhov insisted that he wasn’t wrong: “We’ve done everything to protect the people of Venezuela from a bloodbath,” he wrote, adding that “it’s strange to respond to a month-old video.”

Just as rabid as the war-hawk bloggers, but less independent, is Dmitry Medvedev, once Russia’s puppet president during Putin’s four-year de jure break from office, now deputy chairman of Russia’s security council and the Kremlin’s tame fire-breathing troll. Unlike Putin, who hasn’t been heard from since the supposed attack on his residence, Medvedev has been making some eyebrow-raising statements. He called “the kidnapping of an elected head of state” an “obvious destruction of the norms of international law.” (Pot, kettle, etc.; also, whatever one may think of Trump’s “special operation,” over 50 countries—including 10 Latin American states—have refused to recognize Maduro’s legitimacy since the blatantly rigged 2024 election.) He insisted that after this American display of “might is right,” Russia is beyond “even formal reproach.” He also spat that American foreign policy has always been about grabbing other countries’ resources, and there’s something to be said for Trump’s brutal honesty about it. (As evidence that it has ever been thus, Medvedev cited a supposed statement by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright that “it’s not fair that Russia has such vast natural resources”—in reality, a Russian concoction of murky origin.)

But perhaps the best part in Medvedev’s comments was the suggestion that the “next twist” in American adventurism could be the abduction of Germany’s “neo-Nazi” chancellor Friedrich Merz. Or, who knows, maybe against Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

By the time Solovyov and the other talk-show jocks are back from vacation, the Russian propaganda elite may finally get its talking points together. For now, the message is in disarray. American aggression is bad, but also validates Russia. And, just maybe, it could turn against Russia’s enemies.