Russian arms firm pulls out of Venezuela as debt spirals

State-owned Rostec moves its staff out of struggling country as payments for military hardware dry up

RUSSIA has informed Washington that it has withdrawn “most of their people” from Venezuela, Donald Trump, the US president, said yesterday on Twitter.

The remark came after a source close to the Russian defence ministry told The Daily Telegraph that Russia’s largest weapons exporter, Rostec, had downsized its presence in Caracas over long-outstanding payments for military hardware and services.

It was not immediately clear that Mr Trump’s post referred to Rostec personnel. The Wall Street Journal reported that Rostec’s presence in Venezuela was down to a few dozen people after peaking at around 1,000.

Rostec has been moving its staff out of Venezuela in the past four months after realising that the funds have dried up, the source said.

The Kremlin has not yet commented on the claims, but a spokesman for Rostec said that the WSJ numbers were dozens of times higher than the real figure. The company did not reply to a request for their own headcount of staff in Venezuela.

“The composition of the representative office has not changed for many years,” a spokesman said. “Technical specialists come to the country to carry out repairs and maintenance of previously supplied machines. For instance, the maintenance of a batch of planes has recently been completed.”

Venezuela’s military operates an extensive selection of Russian hardware, and has been one of Moscow’s largest customers – signing more than £7.9 billion) in contracts for equipment ranging from Kalashnikov rifles to Sukhoi jets and missile systems. The sales have helped cement political ties between Caracas and Moscow.

The arms trade is inherently political but Russia will generally sell arms to any nation that can afford them – in the past four years, however, Venezuela has struggled to meet its payments.

Moscow rakes in around $15billion £12billion) annually from military exports and that money flows through Rostec, a massive state-owned holding company.

Russia’s arms industry deploys significant personnel abroad to manage its global empire.

Some of these representatives work out of the Russian embassy on diplomatic passports. The vast majority of them are instructors or technicians who fly in to teach customers to operate and take care of their purchases. Then they leave if no further contracts are signed.