Russian State-Owned Enterprises have been perceived as foreign policy tools for a long time. Some of their operations did not have a logic from strictly economic point of view. However, as the paper argues on the case of Rosneft in Venezuela after its pullover from the country in 2020, such perceptions ignore the setting of Russia’s political economy and the role of informal connections. Using the theory of economic statecraft combined with internationalization theories used by international business theory, it examines the period of the company’s decision to enter the Latin American market in 2010 to the sales of its assets in 2020. The paper concludes that the failed investment of Rosneft in Venezuela is largely a result of the mechanism known as ‘privatizing gains, socializing losses.’
