By Robbin Laird
The January 3, 2026 U.S. operation in Venezuela can be understood not as an isolated hemispheric intervention, but as a deliberate strike against Russia’s external energy ecosystem and sanctions-evasion machinery, designed to erode Moscow’s war-fighting capacity in Ukraine over time.
What is being reordered is not merely a hostile regime in the Western Hemisphere, but the geography and logistics of global oil flows that have quietly underwritten the Kremlin’s long war. What appears on the surface as a regime-change operation is simultaneously a campaign to close one of Russia’s most important economic pressure valves for sustaining protracted conflict.
This operation must be situated within what I have termed the Global War in Ukraine, a system-defining contest that has already transformed the international order more profoundly than any single event since the end of the Cold War. The war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 has metastasized into a comprehensive struggle encompassing military innovation, energy security, alliance restructuring, and economic warfare across multiple theaters. Venezuela represents the opening of a new front in this wider campaign, one that targets the financial sinews sustaining Russia’s ability to wage war rather than the battlefield itself.
Venezuela as a Russian Energy Node
For over a decade, Venezuela has functioned as an offshore extension of Russia’s energy presence in the Western Hemisphere, not merely as a diplomatic fellow traveler, but as an integrated component of Moscow’s global hydrocarbon strategy. Russian-linked firms secured equity stakes, financing arrangements, and operating positions in Venezuelan upstream projects, using the country’s heavy crude reserves to diversify a wider portfolio of sanctioned molecules and to maintain leverage within OPEC-plus politics. That presence was renewed and significantly deepened in November 2025, when Caracas approved a 15-year extension of key joint ventures between PDVSA and Roszarubezhneft, locking in Russian access to Venezuelan barrels through 2041 despite multilayered U.S .sanctions.
Venezuela’s geology and degraded infrastructure amplify its strategic value to Moscow as a sanctions-era partner. The Orinoco Belt’s massive heavy-oil reserves, among the world’s largest proven deposits, though technically demanding and capital-intensive, represent one of the few remaining basins that could be ramped up with foreign capital after years of chronic underinvestment and operational decay.
This offered Russia both a hedge against its own future production declines and a cooperative platform for price management within global energy markets. In effect, the Kremlin could treat future Venezuelan output as part of a wider energy axis alongside Iran and other non-aligned producers, collectively exerting leverage over supply volumes, benchmark pricing, and the politics of sanctions enforcement.
The Shadow Fleet and Sanctions Evasion Architecture
Since 2022, Russia has leaned heavily on a rapidly expanded shadow fleet of aging tankers operating under flags of convenience, utilizing dark transponders, ship-to-ship transfers at sea, and deliberately opaque ownership structures to move sanctioned crude and refined products. Iran and Venezuela pioneered many of these evasion techniques over the preceding decade, and Russia effectively grafted itself onto this pre-existing dark-fleet ecosystem centered on those states.
Venezuela’s ports, storage system, and zombie‑tanker ‘ghost fleet’ have become a central hub in sanctions‑evasion logistics, enabling ship‑to‑ship transfers, re‑flagging, identity theft, and falsified documentation to obscure the origin of sanctioned oil cargoes.
Russian suppliers increasingly use the same shadow‑fleet and sanctions‑resistant trading ecosystem, overlapping tankers, intermediaries, and blending points, that services Venezuelan crude, facilitating the movement of Russian barrels into global markets with obscured origin.
By exploiting the expanding shadow‑fleet ecosystem and non‑G7 services, Russian crude and products have been able to sidestep the G7 price‑cap regime and sell at levels well above the 60‑dollar‑per‑barrel ceiling, preserving substantial export revenues. In practical terms, Venezuela’s oil sector has operated as part of this sanctions‑evasion architecture, a site for processing, logistics, and juridical camouflage, helping convert measures that were designed as decisive embargo instruments into persistent but manageable friction for Moscow’s hydrocarbon trade.
How the Operation Attacks Russian Energy Leverage
The January 3 operation and the subsequent assertion of practical control over Venezuelan oil assets directly target three pillars of this Russian-linked energy ecosystem: ownership structures, throughput capacity, and sanctions-evasion infrastructure. By capturing Maduro, sidelining PDVSA’s existing leadership, and creating conditions for freezing or renegotiating joint venture agreements, Washington has manufactured an opportunity to systematically unpick Russian and Iranian stakes in Venezuelan upstream projects that were designed to anchor their presence through mid-century. Contracts that locked in Russian equity and operational control to 2041 now exist under a fundamentally transformed political and coercive reality in which US forces and their chosen Venezuelan interlocutors possess the leverage to reopen terms, suspend operations, or exclude specific foreign partners entirely.
On throughput, the Trump administration has signaled that core sanctions on Venezuelan crude exports will remain in place even as selected U.S. energy firms prepare substantial investments on the order of several billion dollars to restore production capacity over a multi-year timeline. This combination of physical control on the ground and a phased, license-based reopening of export flows gives Washington powerful leverage over how, when, and through which channels new Venezuelan barrels enter global markets, and which traders, intermediaries, and tankers are permitted access to loadings. Russian-linked entities and shadow-fleet vessels can be systematically excluded from participating in these flows, and any attempts to replicate the previous opaque patterns can be characterized as interference with U.S.-controlled assets, thereby justifying interdiction, seizure, or expanded sanctions under counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, or national security authorities.
Finally, the operation creates both political and legal cover for a substantially more aggressive campaign against the dark-fleet networks themselves. By publicly branding targeted tankers, shipping companies, and maritime service providers as instruments of narco-authoritarian regimes and criminal cartels operating in both Venezuela and Russia, these entities become significantly easier targets for secondary sanctions, insurance blacklisting, port access denial, and potentially kinetic disruption operations. This accelerates a trajectory already visible throughout 2024-2025, when Western enforcement measures expanded from price caps alone to the systematic designation of specific vessels, beneficial owners, flag registries, intermediaries, and shipping agents.
Squeezing Russia’s War-Financing Model
All of these mechanisms connect directly to the Kremlin’s war-financing strategy for Ukraine.
Since February 2022, Moscow has sought to carry the fiscal burden of sustained high-intensity warfare by maximizing cash extraction from energy exports while leaning heavily on domestic credit expansion, deliberately avoiding politically dangerous broad-based taxation that could erode domestic support.
Despite Western sanctions, Russia’s fossil fuel exports continued to yield substantial income in 2024 on the order of USD 180–190 billion by reasonable synthesis of available estimates with baseline scenarios suggesting that, absent significantly tighter enforcement, annual fossil fuel revenues are likely to remain well into the triple‑digit billions of dollars, and plausibly above USD 130 billion, through 2026.
The shadow fleet has been absolutely central to sustaining these flows, offering alternative logistics networks, discounted transport, and opacity sufficient to keep Russian barrels moving to non-aligned buyers willing to accept ambiguous documentation and elevated compliance risk.
The strategic logic behind transforming Venezuela from a Russian-aligned energy partner into a U.S.-controlled supplier is to attack Moscow’s revenue model at the margins and over an extended timeline.
If US-backed investment can gradually restore even a portion of Venezuela’s lost production capacity, adding perhaps 500,000 to 1 million barrels per day to global supply over several years, those incremental barrels will represent non-Russian supply entering a market that OPEC-plus still attempts to manage through coordinated production cuts and quota allocations.
This additional supply places a ceiling on benchmark prices that would otherwise favor the Kremlin’s fiscal position.
Even modest, sustained downward pressure on Brent and WTI benchmarks, on the order of $5-10 per barrel over multiple years, would translate into cumulative lost revenues for Moscow in the tens of billions of dollars, materially narrowing its economic room for maneuver in sustaining a protracted war without resorting to the politically perilous option of comprehensive domestic taxation.
Washington’s emerging operational objective is not the politically and economically impossible task of completely shutting down Russian oil exports, an action that would spike global prices to catastrophic levels and fracture the anti-Russia coalition, but rather to ensure that each exported barrel earns Moscow progressively less net revenue, moves through increasingly risky and expensive channels, faces higher insurance premiums and compliance costs, and operates under perpetual threat of interdiction or designation.
Venezuela’s controlled re-entry into global markets advances this goal by providing alternative supply volumes to price-sensitive buyers in Asia and elsewhere, while simultaneously legitimizing and enabling a substantially harsher enforcement campaign against the sanctions-busting routes and networks that previously operated with Venezuela’s tacit cooperation or active facilitation.
The Global War Context: Structure Over Mood
To fully comprehend the significance of the Venezuela operation, it must be situated within the broader transformation that the Ukraine conflict has wrought on the international system. In my forthcoming analysis of this global war, I have emphasized a fundamental principle: structure outlives mood. The war in Ukraine is not merely about territorial control in Donbas or the fate of a single nation. It represents a comprehensive contest over whether the international order.
Russia’s February 2022 invasion did not emerge from a vacuum. The escalatory narrative was hiding in plain sight for those willing to see it. Putin’s July 2021 essay questioning Ukraine’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation, Russia’s November 2021 draft security treaties demanding legally binding constraints on NATO, and sustained military buildups along Ukrainian borders throughout late 2021 and early 2022 all pointed toward an impending confrontation.
What Western policymakers failed to adequately appreciate was that Moscow had concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the post-Cold War settlement was unsustainable, that NATO expansion represented an existential threat requiring forceful response, and that a window of opportunity existed to act before Ukraine became irreversibly integrated into Western security structures.
Yet Moscow’s attempted fait accompli backfired catastrophically, triggering consequences that have reshaped the global landscape far beyond Ukraine’s borders. NATO, which Moscow treated as a moribund bureaucracy, has undergone its most dramatic transformation since its founding. Finland and Sweden abandoned centuries of military non-alignment to join the alliance. Germany launched its Zeitenwende with over 100 billion euros allocated for rearmament. The UK and France have coordinated their nuclear deterrent postures and established the Coalition of the Willing, a 31-nation grouping that committed 40 billion euros in combined assistance for 2025 alone. European energy independence from Russia, once dismissed as economically impossible, was achieved within 18 months through emergency LNG infrastructure, renewable acceleration, and strategic diversification.
The Multi-Polar Authoritarian Axis and Marketplace Dynamics
Parallel to NATO’s revival, the war accelerated the formation of what might be termed a multi-polar authoritarian axis comprising Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet this axis operates fundamentally differently from Cold War-era blocs. It functions as a transactional marketplace rather than an ideologically cohesive alliance with each member pursuing distinct strategic objectives while exploiting perceived Western weaknesses and divisions.
China’s relationship with Russia exemplifies these dynamics most starkly. Beijing has deepened economic and financial integration with Moscow substantially since 2022, the yuan now represents over 50 percent of Russia’s trade settlements compared to less than 2 percent pre-war, while Russian energy flows to China at significant discounts to global benchmark prices. Russia has effectively transitioned from energy price-setter to price-taker in this relationship, a subordination that reveals profound asymmetry: the partnership is existentially necessary for Moscow but strategically optional for Beijing. China has acquired leverage that can be exercised whenever Xi Jinping calculates it serves Chinese interests, whether that involves pressuring Russia toward negotiations, extracting additional concessions on border territories and resources, or simply maintaining the status quo of Russian dependence.
North Korea’s involvement has been even more dramatic and consequential. Pyongyang has supplied an estimated 40 percent of Russia’s artillery shell consumption and has deployed up to 30,000 troops to support Russian operations, representing the first major overseas combat deployment of North Korean forces since the Korean War. In exchange, North Korea receives hard currency, access to Russian military technology, and invaluable combat experience for its military, experience that poses direct security implications for South Korea, Japan, and US forces in the Indo-Pacific. Iran has similarly provided drones, missiles, and technical expertise, using Russia as a testing ground for systems that might subsequently be deployed against Israel or US interests in the Middle East.
Energy Security as System Infrastructure
One of the war’s most instructive lessons has been the demonstration that energy security constitutes critical system infrastructure for geopolitical competition, not merely an economic variable subject to market optimization. The Baltic states’ February 2025 synchronization with the Continental European electricity grid, severing their final connection to the Soviet-era system after nearly two decades of planning and over 1.2 billion euros in EU investment, exemplified this principle. That technical achievement carried profound strategic meaning: it isolated Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, demonstrated that European energy sovereignty from Moscow is achievable despite earlier skepticism, and proved that infrastructure investments guided by security imperatives can reshape strategic geography.
Venezuela fits precisely into this emerging paradigm. Control over major oil reserves and production infrastructure is being recognized as a strategic asset comparable to control over critical shipping chokepoints, semiconductor supply chains, or rare earth mineral deposits. The Trump administration’s willingness to assert direct control over Venezuelan energy assets, despite significant diplomatic costs and operational risks, signals that Washington has internalized this lesson and is prepared to weaponize energy geography as explicitly as it employs financial sanctions or export controls.
Risks, Constraints, and Coalition Fragmentation
The Venezuela strategy carries substantial risks and operational constraints that must be acknowledged candidly. Technically, reviving Venezuela’s oil sector represents a multi-year, capital-intensive undertaking hampered by severely degraded infrastructure, chronic underinvestment, and the emigration of skilled technical personnel over two decades of mismanagement. The disruption from labor strikes, political uncertainty, contractual disputes, and potential sabotage could actually tighten near-term global supply and temporarily lift benchmark prices, ironically providing Russia with a short-term revenue windfall even as the long-term strategic objective is to constrain Moscow’s earnings.
Politically, the operation’s optics reinforce longstanding accusations of American neocolonialism and interventionism in Latin America. Many states in the Global South that were already skeptical of Western narratives regarding Ukraine may perceive little moral distinction between Russian military aggression in Europe and U.S. coercive regime change in the Western Hemisphere. This perception risks undermining the moral clarity that Kiev and its supporters have worked to establish that the conflict represents a fundamental test of whether sovereignty and territorial integrity retain meaning in the 21st century international system.
If significant numbers of non-aligned states respond by purchasing increased volumes of discounted Russian crude, actively resisting enforcement of price caps, or offering registry services and insurance to shadow fleet vessels, they could substantially offset the intended revenue squeeze on Moscow. The success of this strategy therefore depends not only on operational execution in Venezuela itself, but on maintaining sufficient international support or at least acquiescence to prevent the emergence of alternative channels that simply replicate the sanctions-evasion networks Washington is attempting to dismantle.
Conclusion: Venezuela in the System War
Over the medium and long term, Venezuela is being systematically folded into a global theater of economic warfare whose central strategic front remains Ukraine but whose operational geography spans multiple continents and domains. The comprehensive campaign against Russia’s oil-based war-financing ecosystem now encompasses interlocking efforts: targeted sanctions on major energy firms and their executives, progressive designation of shadow fleet vessels and beneficial owners, Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russia-linked tankers and port facilities, EU and UK legal measures against insurance providers and maritime services, and now direct American seizure of control over a rival energy province that had been closely tied to Moscow’s interests.
If Washington can successfully navigate the substantial technical challenges of restoring Venezuelan production capacity and manage the considerable political costs of being perceived as an interventionist power, the combined effect of these measures will be to progressively narrow Russia’s financial and strategic room for maneuver even if the territorial situation on the ground in Ukraine changes only incrementally or enters prolonged stalemate. The objective is not immediate decisive victory through economic coercion alone, but rather sustained attrition that raises the costs of continued aggression to politically unsustainable levels over time.
In this sense, the Venezuelan operation should be understood not as a discrete episode, but as the opening of a new phase in what I have characterized as a system war, a comprehensive contest in which energy flows, tanker registries, joint venture contracts, and production infrastructure are treated as instruments of grand strategy alongside conventional military capabilities and territorial control.
The choice to open this particular front in the Caribbean underscores how profoundly the Ukraine conflict has already transformed into a wider struggle over the fundamental structure of the global energy order, and by extension, over which states and coalitions will possess the economic capacity to sustain their geopolitical ambitions in an era of renewed great-power competition.
The Emergence of the Multi-Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024
And my forthcoming comprehensive book on the global war in Ukraine. I am publishing a much shorter book as an essay built on the more comprehensive one and that appears on February 15, 2026.
