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Russia’s Federation Council (Senate) ratified its agreement to strengthen military cooperation with Nicaragua, signed in Moscow in September 2025.
The agreement “will establish the necessary legal foundations to determine the objectives, directions, and forms of bilateral military cooperation (and) will protect the interests of Russian citizens carrying out missions under this agreement within Nicaraguan jurisdiction,” according to the explanatory note accompanying the corresponding Russian law.
The pact also stipulates cooperation between the parties in several key areas, such as the exchange of information on matters of mutual interest in the military sphere.
It also includes “the coordination of efforts to jointly counter challenges and threats to global and regional security and stability” and “the exchange of experience and information in the fight against extremist ideologies and international terrorism.”
It further includes “the exchange of experience and information in combating piracy and the joint training of troops.”
The agreement was originally signed on September 22, 2025, by Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, who on that date met with the head of Nicaragua’s Army, General Julio César Aviles, and it was ratified this week.
Nicaragua’s Military Agreements with Russia
Previously, in December 2024, Russia had already approved a draft intergovernmental agreement on military cooperation with Nicaragua proposed by the Russian Ministry of Defense and coordinated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other Russian institutions, for a period of five years.
The draft stipulated that military cooperation with Nicaragua would include the exchange of opinions and information on military issues of mutual interest and the coordination of efforts to jointly confront challenges and threats to global and regional security and stability.
Russia is a longstanding ally of Nicaragua that, during the first Sandinista government (1979–1990), supplied Soviet weaponry to the Nicaraguan Armed Forces—an alliance that continues today not only through material and military assistance but also through political support in major international organizations.
In August 2024, an investigation by CONFIDENCIAL revealed that a Nicaraguan Army base located at Cerro Mokoron, south of Managua, has in recent years become one of Russia’s main espionage centers.
The report, Russian espionage center operates at Mokorón military base in Managua, details that Russian officials are the only ones who control and handle the equipment and the information obtained, while Nicaraguan officers are limited to providing “security” at the base, according to sources with access to the facility.
“Nicaragua is the most visible center of Russian surveillance (in Latin America), under the unconditional support of the regime of (Daniel) Ortega to (Vladimir) Putin, and longstanding historical ties with the former Soviet Union,” according to a report by the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University (FIU), prepared by national security researcher Douglas Farah, as detailed in a Confidencial article published in October 2024.
“Nicaragua Becomes a Russian Military Base”
The ratification of the military agreement between Russia and Nicaragua turns the Central American country “into a Russian military base,” denounced Nicaraguan opposition leader Felix Maradiaga.
In a statement, Maradiaga—who in February 2023 was one of 222 political prisoners expelled to the United States and stripped of his nationality—also warned that the agreement “breaks the reasonable balance of forces in Central America and directly violates the 1995 Framework Treaty on Democratic Security in Central America.”
Maradiaga, also interim national coordinator of the Ruta del Cambio party, warned that Nicaragua’s spouses and co-presidents, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, are not only violating Nicaraguan sovereignty but also directly endangering the security of Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, and Belize.
He urgently called on Central American governments to formally invoke the 1995 Framework Treaty and begin procedures to expel the “Ortega regime from the Central American Integration System (SICA).”
He also called on the Organization of American States (OAS) to speak out with the “firmness required” by the Inter-American Democratic Charter and to initiate the process of formally declaring the “illegitimacy of the Ortega regime.”
He urged the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and democratic allies not to turn a blind eye to this military cooperation agreement, which, he warned, “will have long-term security consequences for the entire Western Hemisphere.”
“To the international community as a whole, to understand that tolerating this pact in silence is enabling a new authoritarian advance at the very gates of the American continent,” he added.
Ortega and Murillo, “Traitors to the Nation”
Maradiaga said what was signed and ratified in Moscow “is a Russian military base installed at the gates of the [American] continent,” not “a routine act of bilateral cooperation.”
“It is the formalization of an unacceptable political project: the conversion of Nicaragua into a satellite state of Vladimir Putin, an operational platform serving the Kremlin’s geostrategic interests within the American hemisphere,” he said.
In his view, it is an agreement drafted as a “blank check” in favor of Moscow, including the exchange of military and intelligence information on “matters of mutual interest”; coordination of efforts against “threats to global and regional security”; joint troop training; cooperation in electronic warfare; cooperation in radiological, chemical, and biological protection; and the creation of a permanent working group and a joint annual military cooperation plan.
With this agreement—valid for five years with indefinite automatic renewal—and offering “special jurisdictional protection” to Russian citizens carrying out missions in Nicaraguan territory, “Nicaragua becomes, as of today, a Russian military base,” maintained the opposition leader, exiled in the United States, who criticized Ortega and Murillo’s “geopolitical servility” toward Russia.
“Ortega is not an ally of Russia; he is a vassal of Russia. And this is not the first time he has dragged the nation into a foreign adventure. The one who now authorizes this pact is the same person who in the 1980s involved Nicaragua, at its most vulnerable moment, in the worst geopolitical conflict of the 20th century—the Cold War—with a devastating human and economic cost from which we have yet to recover,” he charged.
“Today he is doing it again. He is doing so by aligning with a regime that illegally invades Ukraine, that props up the theocratic regime of the ayatollahs in Iran, and that is a time bomb for world peace. Ortega, with abject codependence and open servility, is once again gambling the entire fate of a country on the interests of a foreign power,” continued Maradiaga, who described the agreement as “an act of treason against the homeland.”
Daniel Ortega, 80, who has been in power since 2007—co-governs the Central American nation with his wife, Rosario Murillo, and is Russia’s main ally in the region.
Nicaragua, along with North Korea and Syria, are the only countries that have recognized the legality of Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
Previously, Nicaragua also recognized the independence of the Georgian separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, backed by Russia.
*With information from EFE
