Russia’s fearsome arsenal fizzled in Venezuela. Here’s why.

Venezuela’s advanced, Russian-made air defense systems were not even hooked up to radar when U.S. helicopters swooped in to snatch President Nicolás Maduro, U.S. officials say, rendering Venezuelan airspace surprisingly unprotected long before the Pentagon launched its attack. The vaunted, Russian-made S-300 and Buk-M2 air defense systems were supposed to be a potent symbol of the close ties between Venezuela and Russia, two rivals of the United States. Their alliance appeared to give Russia a growing foothold in the Western Hemisphere. With great fanfare, Venezuela announced it was buying the air defenses from Russia in 2009 amid tensions with Washington. Venezuela’s leftist president at the time, Hugo Chávez, heralded the weapons as a deterrent to U.S. aggression. But Venezuela was unable to maintain and operate the S-300 - one of the world’s most advanced antiaircraft systems - as well as the Buk defense systems, leaving its airspace vulnerable when the Pentagon launched Operation Absolute Resolve to capture Maduro, four current and former U.S. officials said. Beyond that, an analysis by The New York Times of photos, videos and satellite imagery found that some air defense components were still in storage, rather than operational, at the time of the attack. Taken together, the evidence suggests that, despite months of warnings, Venezuela was not ready for the U.S. invasion. In short, the Venezuelan military’s incompetence appears to have played a big role in the U.S. success. Venezuela’s much-touted antiaircraft systems were essentially not connected when U.S. forces entered the skies over Venezuela’s capital, and they may not have been working for years, former officials and analysts said. “After years of corruption, poor logistics and sanctions, all those things would have certainly degraded the readiness of Venezuela’s air defense systems,” said Richard de la Torre, a former CIA station chief in Venezuela who now runs Tower Strategy, a Washington-based lobbying firm. Russia shared in the failure, officials and experts said, because Russian trainers and technicians would have had to ensure the system was fully operational and help keep it that way. “Russia’s own war demands in Ukraine may have limited its ability to sustain those systems in Venezuela, to make sure they were fully integrated,” de la Torre said. In fact, two former U.S. officials argued that Russia may have quietly allowed the military equipment it sold Venezuela to fall into disrepair, to avoid greater conflict with Washington. If the Venezuelan military had shot down an American aircraft, they said, the blowback on Russia could have been significant. When Chávez bought the air defense systems from Russia, they were part of a spending spree worth billions of dollars that was supposed to remake Venezuela’s military, filling its arsenal with Su-30 fighters jets, T-72 tanks and thousands of shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile systems known as Manpads. Before then, Venezuela had largely relied on U.S. military hardware, but as hostilities grew, Washington banned the sale of arms to the South American country in 2006. “With these rockets it’s going to be very difficult for foreign planes...

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