The Communist Party of Cuba, the Sandinista dictatorship of Nicaragua, and socialist Venezuela have expressed effusive support for Russia and its “legitimate security” interests in the past week in response to Vladimir Putin’s decision to begin a full military assault on Ukraine.
Putin’s Russia has invested heavily in cultivating allies in the Western Hemisphere. Putin personally called the dictators of all three countries in late January, days after President Joe Biden announced he did not believe America would force Russia to suffer consequences in the event of a “minor incursion” of Ukraine. A month later, as Putin began an invasion into central Ukraine – including the capital, Kyiv – the three countries formed an axis of support for Moscow significantly at odds with the rest of the two continents they inhabit and much of the free world.
Putin announced a week ago he would recognize two regions in east Ukraine – Donetsk and Luhansk – as sovereign states. In that speech, he declared that the entire concept of Ukraine as a country “was completely created by Russia” and that Ukrainians had “no tradition” of being a sovereign state. By Thursday, Putin was sending a military force into multiple major population centers in Ukraine, claiming that the “countries” of Donetsk and Luhansk had requested assistance – which, if true, would not explain the assault on Kyiv, among other areas outside of Donbas, the collective name of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The war has received widespread condemnation in the West, save for Putin’s socialist and communist allies.
TOPSHOT – A photograph taken on February 19, 2022, shows smoke rising from an explosion after a shelling in Novohnativka village, Donetsk region, not far from position of Ukrainian Military Forces on the front line with Russia-backed separatists (ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP via Getty Images).
On Saturday, the Cuban Foreign Relations Ministry (Minrex) published a statement blaming the United States for the war in Ukraine, claiming that Russia has demands for “security guarantees” that America ignored, thus necessitating an invasion of Ukraine.
“The American insistence on continuing the progressive expansion of NATO towards the borders of the Russian Federation has led us to this scenario, with unpredictable implications that could have been avoided,” Minrex claimed. “History will demand accountability from the government of the United States for the consequences of an increasingly offensive military doctrine outside of the borders of NATO, which threatens peace, security, and international stability.”
The Cuban Foreign Ministry barely mentioned Ukraine in its statement, other than to “profoundly lament the loss of innocent civilian life” in the country at the hands of Putin.
Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, went further in defending Putin directly in an opinion article published on Sunday.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated firmness before the American and NATO plan to surround his country with arms and military forces,” the column read. “Putin has assured that he was led to make this decision as a last resort left to him by the West.”
The article went on to claim that Donetsk and Luhansk were “being attacked and bombarded by Ukrainian soldiers” while “hundreds of tons of modern arms from NATO and the United States arrived in Kyiv,” without informing the reader of the ample evidence of extensive Russian interference in the eight-year Donbas war, including the use of Russian weapons to shoot down commercial airliner Malaysia Airlines 17 in 2014.
In Venezuela, where Russia has previously stationed nuclear bombers, dictator Nicolás Maduro fully embraced the Putin talking point that the war was necessary for the “de-nazification” of Ukraine. Putin and his ministers have repeatedly referred to the Ukrainian government under Zelensky, who is Jewish and whose ancestors fought against the Nazis in World War II, as a Nazi government.
“The extremist right that has taken over the governments of Ukraine has never been interested in resolving conflicts via dialogue, has never been interested in peace, has never been interested in respecting Russia,” Maduro railed last week, shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
“There have been several times that President Putin has attempted direct dialogue with the governors of Ukraine to establish a base of understanding and conflict resolution,” Maduro claimed, “but the fascist elite that executed a coup d’etat in Ukraine and the groups who have taken power in Ukraine on different occasions have stayed away from diplomacy, from respect, from dialogue.”
Zelensky won the presidency in a free and fair election in 2019 – unlike Maduro, who has remained in power illegitimately after a sham election resulted in his constitutional ouster that same year:
“Venezuela announces its complete backing to President Vladimir Putin in the defense of peace of Russia,” Maduro concluded, “in the defense of peace in that region, in the valiant peace of his people and his fatherland. All the support for President Putin, all the support for Russia.”
In Nicaragua, Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega issued a statement on Monday appearing to support sovereignty for Donetsk and Luhansk.
“President Putin has made a step today where what he has done is recognize some republics that, beginning with the 2014 coup, the coup governments did not recognize,” Ortega stated, referring to the resignation of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych five years before Zelensky’s election as a coup. “They have established their governments and are battling.”
On Thursday, the day Putin invaded deeper into Ukraine, Ortega was hosting the head of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, as a guest of honor. Volodin addressed the Nicaraguan National Assembly, the top lawmaking body, and demanded that Nicaraguans stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Putin in the Ukrainian war.
“We are grateful to the president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, who was one of the first to declare the importance of recognizing the independence of these popular regions [Donetsk and Luhansk] to guarantee the security of the people,” Volodin reportedly said, according to La Prensa, a Nicaraguan newspaper.
Volodin claimed the war Putin launched would “prevent humanitarian catastrophe.”
Putin’s gambit may cost the three countries significant financial aid, experts have noted, as sanctions weaken the Russian economy, leaving little expendable cash for Hispanic communist dictators.
“Little by little, Daniel Ortega is losing the possibility of receiving financial aid from one of his few political and economic allies,” La Prensa observed on Monday. Expelling Russian banks from the SWIFT international payment system, for example, could make it more difficult for Moscow to invest in its allied Western regimes.
The Spanish newspaper ABC made a similar observation on Monday of all three countries.
“We don’t know if they [Russia] will have enough to maintain their military a month or a year as they say, what we do know is that with the severe sanctions they will be obligated to cut short aid to their allies of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua,” oil industry analyst José Toro Hardy told the newspaper.