As predicted earlier this year here at PoliGazette, Russia is increasingly improving its relationship with Latin American countries, and cooperating with them in a variety of ways. The intentions of Moscow are, of course, to force the United States to focus on its own rather than Russia’s backyard.

Henry Gomez summarized Russia’s infiltration of Latin America for Pajamas Media today.

‘On Monday, Reuters reported, “The Russian and Cuban military will exchange experience in organizing tactical air defense and in training officers,”‘ Gomez wrote. ‘In September, two Russian strategic bombers landed in Venezuela to conduct “training missions.” Also in September, Russia announced that it would dispatch warships to Venezuela to conduct joint exercises in November.’

This strategy is not new: Russia did the same during the Cold War. From the looks of it, the current situation can be considered an introduction to a second such cold war – the two sides will not go to war with each other. Instead, they will use proxies against each other in virtually every part of the world, and try to establish relationships with countries in the other’s neighborhood.

The United States has done this for years; especially George and eastern Europe come to mind. Some eastern European countries have joined NATO, others are likely to do so in the coming years. In addition to NATO, quite some eastern European countries have joined the European Union, are negotiating about joining, or talking to the EU to start such negotiations soon.

The West is creeping towards Russia, and Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have decided to return the favor.

First Russia attacked Georgia. Then word came out that Russia is increasingly working with Iran to dominate the energy markets. If these two countries will indeed cooperate on a larger scale than they have done so far, they can truly blackmail both the Middle East and a large part of Europe, for both rely heavily on them.

Before the attack on Georgia, Russia had already blackmailed and threatened a variety of other countries, especially in eastern Europe.

And now we have Russia working both economically and militarily with Latin American countries.

In short, Russia is expanding its sphere of influence, just as the United States and Europe have done in recent years.