According to Thomas Grove’s article in the Wall Street Journal,:
Russia has withdrawn key defense advisers from Venezuela, an embarrassment for President Nicolás Maduro as Moscow weighs the leader’s political and economic resilience against growing U.S. pressure.
Russian state defense contractor Rostec, which has trained Venezuelan troops and advised on securing arms contracts, has cut its staff to just a few dozen from about 1,000 at the height of cooperation between Moscow and Caracas several years ago, said a person close to the Russian Defense ministry.
If this is true, it is another decisive nail in the coffin of the catastrophic hugo chavez/nicolas maduro devastation of this once-prosperous country, which used to be the envy of South America…
…but now finds its people – the ones not lucky enough to have escaped across a border – reduced to digging through garbage pails for something to eat, and praying the remain healthy, since the hospitals have no supplies and are virtually non-functional.
The morphing of Venezuela from an economically solid democracy to a socialist hell did not take long to accomplish. All it needed was a charismatic leftist lunatic like chavez to move it most of the way, in no small part by nationalizing just about every domestic industry while expropriating foreign interests…and chavez’s protegé maduro to finish the job.
So far, opposition leader Jose Guaido’s attempts to remove maduro have failed. But that does not mean either he or someone else will be able to excise this human plague from control of Venezuela in the near future and start restoring it to viability.
For the sake of that country, I hope the day is close at hand.
