United States

For so long as Russia is successfully procuring the components it needs for its military, and for so long as Russia is successfully selling its oil, the environment remains target-rich.” Keatinge said it was too early to decide whether the sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil had been effective, because little had been done to enforce secondary sanctions against companies that continued to buy their oil. “A successful sanctions regime relies not only on identifying new targets, but also ensuring implementation against already identified targets,” he said. “Ukraine’s allies need to follow through on implementing existing sanctions and taking action against those that facilitate evasion.”

The Americans and Europeans are coming at this from two different angles. Europe sees Russia rearming, and are worried about anything that allows Russia to regroup, learn lessons and up their defense complex to have another go at Ukraine or test NATO boundaries. The Americans are thinking much more short-term—get the peace process over the line, get a ceasefire, get Ukraine back on its feet and cobble together some sort of cold peace for another year or two." No matter who leaked the conversation, it added to a sense of chaos and uncertainty around the war and diplomacy that will likely be fine with Russia, Ferris said. “This is a fantastic place for the Russians to be. They need to do very little here. All their responses show they don’t feel much need to hurry things along."

Maduro is is an autocrat, so he's constantly thinking that something will happen to him... So he needs to be very close to people, he needs to be very close to the other leaders within the regime, he needs to have the armed forces very close. The more that he plays this figure of a president that goes out and and says things like 'the Americans are about to invade us', 'we need to hold on, Venezuela', 'this is our country', and so on, that's just typical rhetoric of someone who's very cornered... Being an autocrat is such a fragile position... especially because you have the US largest aircraft [carrier] off your coast. It's not like you know you're dealing with Trump and he's sitting in Washington, and you are in Caracas, and everything is fine."