The coronavirus has devastated fragile and conflict-affected states, exacerbating suffering and, in some cases, shifting power dynamics in ways that are likely to influence politics or the conflicts even when the pandemic subsides.

The deeper driver of Venezuela’s implosion isn’t Maduro’s doctrinaire adherence to socialism but, rather, the country’s slide into kleptocracy.

What risks does deeper foreign intervention in the crisis pose for the fate of the Venezuelan opposition led by interim President Juan Guaidó and the region as a whole?

Venezuelans’ best hope is to ensure that the flickering embers of protest and social dissent are not extinguished and that resistance to dictatorship is sustained.

Maduro has no clue how to reverse any of the multiple crises he has set off. At this point, the goal of staying in power is just to be in power.

Russia is Venezuela’s lender of last resort, the last and only place the government can turn in search of a financial lifeline.

As Venezuela sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how the Chávez regime could have conned so many international observers for so long.

In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war.