Venezuela and Ukraine: Two Faces of the Same War

by Costantino Ceoldo

Costantino Ceoldo explains how Maduro’s abduction and Ukrainian aggression expose the true nature of the “rules-based order”.

Venezuela No Longer Exists

Following the kidnapping of its legitimate president, Nicolás Maduro, and his entire family on 3 January 2026, Venezuela no longer exists as a nation because its sovereignty no longer exists. The political experiment of the Bolivarian Republic, so beloved and defended by Hugo Chávez, who worked tirelessly to restore dignity to the indigenous people and workers of Venezuela, is painfully coming to an end thanks to numerous and well-paid internal betrayals.

Maduro’s movements were known in advance and his escort, evidently composed of expendable loyalists, was easily eliminated. Not a single shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile was fired by the Venezuelan defence forces throughout Caracas, and American helicopters were able to fly low with impunity while carrying out their mission. How can we fail to see the betrayals in the army, the secret services, and the entire Venezuelan security apparatus in the way Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping was carried out by the Americans?

President Maduro has been elected twice in regular elections, and U.S. candidates have twice been rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan population. The accusations that Maduro was the puppet master of drug trafficking to the United States, or even that he possessed automatic weapons used against U.S. citizens (sic), are laughable. It is a question of oil, minerals, and geopolitics.

Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources will once again be plundered by U.S. multinationals (mostly) and a few other foreign companies (those from Washington’s vassal states, including Italy, which has long since ceased to be ashamed of its submissive status). Sold off on international markets, only crumbs of the immense profits and gains from the plundering of Venezuelan resources will return to the Venezuelan people, and the nation will be dominated by a local quisling comprador bourgeoisie that will grow fat beyond all limits.

The United States has therefore kidnapped President Maduro as yet another warning to other Latin American countries that they must never delude themselves into thinking they can decide their own destiny, their own lives, and their own politics. This is the “rules-based order” as the American version of the law of the strongest, and it marks the end of any illusion about so-called “international law”, as Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin has pointed out.

There is another important aspect. The great Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, a champion of humanity treacherously assassinated by Trump on 3 January 2020 (sic), was a strategic and logistical genius. Thanks to him, his tireless efforts, and his extraordinary abilities, the Islamic Republic of Iran was able to bypass the sanctions imposed on it by Washington for many years. One of the key elements of Haji Qasem’s plan was Venezuela, which in recent years proved to be a crucial node in an international network that allowed Iran to sell its oil under embargo and acquire critical technologies.

It does not take much imagination to understand that if Venezuelan oil were to return to American hands and flood the world market, the Iranian economy, already under acute stress from years of inhumane sanctions, would suffer further. Looking further ahead, we can easily hypothesise that if Venezuelan oil were to flow freely and in large quantities, the world price of a barrel of oil would plummet—even if Tehran were to close the Strait of Hormuz and bomb the oil fields of the Persian Gulf petro-monarchies, as it was reportedly close to doing during the 12-day war initiated in the summer of 2024 by Israel against the Iranian Ayatollahs.

The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his family, together with his future sham trial in New York—where, apparently, district attorneys are no longer so unwelcome to Donald Trump—therefore represents another step in Israel’s direct and proxy war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The coming months will reveal how tragic the fate of this ancient and noble nation will be.

Zelensky, the Assassin

On New Year’s Eve, a Ukrainian drone struck a restaurant in Khorly, in Kherson Oblast, with an incendiary bomb, killing 27 civilians who were celebrating the arrival of the new year and injuring 31 others, including five children. Since the victims were Russians living in territory under Russian administration, Western media gave the incident little prominence and largely ignored the news: no outrage, no “taking of a stand”, no references to violated human rights.

Civilians die in all wars, and even the Russian armed forces have caused casualties among the Ukrainian civilian population; this is the price of war. However, it is one thing for civilians to die as inevitable collateral damage during military operations that do not specifically target them, and quite another to hunt them down as prey in the hope of provoking a disproportionate retaliation by the enemy.

The Ukrainian armed forces are no strangers to such attacks and have in the past launched drones or fired HIMARS rockets at civilian targets, even striking apartment buildings that did not house military objectives, often in the middle of the night when civilians were most defenceless because they were asleep.

The Ukrainian armed forces, and through them NATO, are taking revenge on Russian civilians for their defeats on the battlefield. The New Year’s Eve attack in Kherson followed just hours after a massive attack on a Russian presidential residence, with Ukrainian drones taking off from Sumy and Chernihiv. The apparent objective was to eliminate Vladimir Putin in a precise and decapitating strike.

At the beginning of the Special Military Operation, Zelensky, the former comedian notorious for his vulgar performances, could also have been decapitated, and it would arguably have been better that way. Naftali Bennett, then Prime Minister of Israel, reportedly called Putin and convinced him not to proceed. Putin gave his word and has always kept it. Does it still make sense to guarantee Zelensky’s survival after everything that has happened?

NATO’s rhetoric is faltering, Trump detests Zelensky and would like to replace him with someone he finds more agreeable, and Europe itself may not survive a Russian victory, as Simplicius has argued on his Substack. Therefore, the longer the war drags on, the worse the peace terms will be for Ukraine and the greater the loss of life, infrastructure, and territory that Kiev will be forced to accept.

I write “Kiev”, yet it is now clear that Ukraine is held captive by a gang of local madmen and murderers lost in their own neo-Nazi delusions. They are instruments of the ideological and transhumanist madness that dominates the self-proclaimed elites of the collective West.

Moscow’s victory must be clear and overwhelming. For now, however, our thoughts go only—painfully—to the victims of Khorly, who will never again be able to embrace their loved ones and who now await true justice.