Last Thursday’s claim emanating from a Russian Federation spokesperson that Guyana and the United Kingdom are jointly stoking the fires of an ongoing insurrection against the Maduro administration in Venezuela, using an unnamed island in the Essequibo river to train “sabotage and spy groups” for reentry into the country, amounts to a contrivance so far-fetched that it would merit no serious attention at all under different circumstances. The extant circumstances, however, are what they are so that Russia’s assertion has presented the Government of Guyana with a seeming foreign policy emergency, the extent of which remains unclear at this time.
All things considered, Guyana cannot afford to take the occurrence lightly and both Georgetown and London have reacted promptly, calling for a retraction of the statement. The real significance of the utterance, however, reposes in the fact that it was made in the first place and, moreover, by the Russian Federation and not some marginal state supportive of the Maduro administration.
What would have prompted Russia, an unquestionable superpower and a country with which Guyana has enjoyed unruffled bilateral relations for decades, to make such an potentially incendiary pronouncement? The answer would appear to lie somewhere within the realm of the bigger stakes ‘tango’ between Moscow and Washington over a troubled but still, (on account of its enormous oil reserves), hugely strategically significant Venezuela. There is a related question here that is of more direct relevance to Guyana. Has Moscow not now, on account of its bizarre pronouncement, knowingly provided Venezuela with a pretext to embark on yet another round of verbal, perhaps even physical hostilities against Guyana which, were such to materialise, will coincide directly with the international ‘buzz’ over Guyana’s several world-class oil finds since May 2015? Is it likely that all this might threaten Guyana’s progress towards first oil?
The continued movement into Guyana by refugees from the economic fallout from Venezuela’s political crisis was probably likely, at one point or another, to trigger some sort of bilateral spat between the two countries. Still, last week’s claim by the Russian Federation, coming in the manner that it did, would almost certainly have taken the Government of Guyana by surprise.
Setting aside the implications of Russia’s shocker for immediate-term relations between the two neighbouring South American Republics, it would seem that Guyana may now have become something of a pawn in a strategic conundrum of much greater significance deriving from the ensuing efforts by the USA and the Russian Federation to extend their influence in Venezuela.
Since no informed analyst would attribute any serious validity to the assertion by the Russian Foreign Ministry, then the most intriguing question has to do with the real motive for Moscow’s stunning pronouncement. Has the Russian Federation now decided that gaining more traction in its push to extend its influence in the hemisphere takes precedence over its long-standing regimen of good relations with Guyana? However unsettling that question might be, it must, it seems, now be factored in Guyana’s calculations, going forward. After all, the future of relations between Guyana and the Russian Federation could, in the longer term, prove to be every bit as strategically important as Guyana’s relations with Venezuela.
It was always unlikely that the steady and considerable returns from Guyana’s oil pursuits would go unnoticed by its western neighbour, particularly given the fact that those discoveries, first by ExxonMobil, and most recently by the British company Tullow, have been coinciding roughly with Venezuela’s own dramatic economic meltdown. Last December’s interception of two ExxonMobil research vessels by a Venezuelan naval craft inside Guyana’s territorial waters was one of those foreboding signals that Guyana’s oil discoveries are a matter of strategic concern to Venezuela, the latter wishing to always be better positioned to impose its will in the matter of its territorial claim. So that while the December interception of the ExxonMobil vessels passed without further incident, it served the purpose of signalling to Guyana that it’s ambition to realise the status of a major oil-producing country was being monitored with concern in Caracas.
While both Guyana and Britain have called for a retraction of the statement made by the Russian Foreign Ministry, such a retraction is probably unlikely to materialise. The whole idea, it seems, was to create a pretext for a fresh round of hostilities towards Guyana by a beleaguered administration in Caracas which may now be casting around for any development that might help distract attention from a crisis that persists without any sign of abating.
As has historically been the case in instances such as this, Guyana’s first port of diplomatic call is likely to be the UN and after that, the country’s bilateral and multilateral friends including CARICOM, and the OAS. What the Russian pronouncement has done is to give rise to the need for an unanticipated but absolutely necessary diplomatic offensive in order to forestall such follow-up action to the pronouncement as might be contemplated by the Maduro administration. For that reason, Guyana cannot afford to ignore what the Russians have had to say, far-fetched as it may sound.
