Russia Threatens to Put Troops in Cuba, Venezuela to Target America

One of Russia’s most senior diplomats practically just threatened the United States with the possibility of stationing Russian troops and military assets in Cuba and Venezuela.

The veiled threat was made on Thursday by Moscow’s most senior Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, as cited by AP.

Putin Wants to Dictate the West’s Future

Sensing the foreign policy and international security weakness of Sleepy Joe Biden, Putin has been increasingly aggressive towards the West.

The present-day collision course between Russia and the West primarily started in 2014, when Putin sent Russian troops to seize and annex Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

It then stirred a still ongoing pro-Russian insurgency in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. Even before then, in 2008, Russia waged a brief war on Georgia, another pro-Western former Soviet nation.

As a result of his threats to invade Ukraine in the spring and again in the earlier winter, Putin has gotten two meetings with Joe Biden.

The Russian leader has also been able to secure the survival of his favorite foreign project and future cash cow, the Nord Stream 2 gas transit pipeline from Russia to Germany.

However, at the end of 2021, Moscow stepped up its aggressive rhetoric towards the West, issuing security demands that are impossible to meet. One demand says neither Ukraine, nor any other nation in Eastern Europe, will be allowed to join NATO.

Brazen Threat of Violating the Monroe Doctrine

Speaking to a Russian TV station, RTVi, on Thursday, Ryabkov made the veiled threat of Russian deployments to Latin America.

More specifically, he stated he was able to “neither confirm, not exclude” a scenario in which Moscow would be sending its troops and military assets to Cuba and Venezuela.

Apart from being a gigantic provocation and threat to the security of the United States, such a move would be a direct violation of the 1817 Monroe Doctrine.

America has been sticking to this doctrine in order to keep foreign imperialists out of the Western Hemisphere.

In his interview, Ryabkov practically blamed the United States for its natural refusal to allow Putin to dictate the future of the NATO alliance.

The senior Russian diplomat claimed whether Russia would put troops in Latin America “depends on the action” of the United States, a classic mafia-style blackmail approach.

Last month, Ryabkov made a bizarre historical comparison by claiming the current tensions, with respect to Ukraine, are like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

During this crisis, the world came close to a nuclear war when the former Soviet Union tried to place nuclear missiles in Cuba. The United States, under President John Kennedy, put a naval blockade around the island.

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev negotiated a deal under which the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles slated for Cuban deployment, while the US pulled missiles it had in Turkey.

Putin, shortly after his first election as president of Russia in 2000, shut down a Soviet military surveillance facility in Cuba. However, in recent years, Moscow boosted its ties with Cuba’s lingering communist dictatorship.

Back in December 2018, Russia sent two of its nuclear-capable bombers, Tu-160, to Venezuela in support of the embattled Venezuelan far-left dictator, Nicolas Maduro.

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