Q COSTARICA — In a context where Russia invaded Ukraine several years ago, the presence of Russian military personnel in neighboring Nicaragua is a source of concern for Costa Rica’s Foreign Minister, Manuel Tovar.
Speaking to AFP in France on various topics, the diplomat did not hide his unease.
“There is a significant Russian military presence in Nicaragua. They recently renewed a military cooperation agreement with Moscow, and it seems to me that these troops are far from where they should be. (…) This is a factor that worries us, particularly knowing that there is a war in the heart of Europe, caused by Russia in Ukraine, and we are not comfortable with it,” Tovar said.
The AFP report emphasizes that the regime led by dictators Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, is Moscow’s main partner in Central America.
Tovar did not suggest in any way that Nicaragua is preparing for an invasion, but his words seem to imply that such a scenario cannot be completely ruled out.
Russian troops are permitted to legally operate in Nicaragua under long-standing, biannual presidential decrees that authorize foreign forces to enter the country for joint training, law enforcement, and humanitarian assistance.
While the Nicaraguan government portrays this as routine, Russia and Nicaragua ratified a major military cooperation pact that embeds Russian forces deeper into the country.
This agreement expands Russian intelligence sharing, electronic warfare cooperation, and joint training, leading international observers and political opponents to warn that Nicaragua is effectively transitioning into a Russian base of operations in the Western Hemisphere.
According to Confidencial Nicaragua, Nicaragua’s leading online news source, in April, Russia’s Federation Council (Senate) ratified its agreement to strengthen military cooperation with Nicaragua, signed in Moscow in September 2025.
“Nicaragua is becoming a Russian military base,” says opposition figure and former political prisoner Felix Maradiaga.
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.
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 revealed that the 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.
Satellite Monitoring. Nicaragua hosts a ground station of the Russian GLONASS satellite positioning system.
The Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos has erected stations for the Globalnaya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS) system* in Russia, Antarctica, and South Africa, as well as in the Western Hemisphere, four stations in Brazil, and since April 2017, has had one in Nicaragua.
Last November, Latinamerica21.com reported that, with limited resources but clear objectives, Moscow made Nicaragua its military enclave in Central America, seeking to project symbolic influence and challenging the US-led order.
Military cooperation between Russia and Nicaragua dates back to the Cold War, when nearly 90% of the country’s military equipment came from the former Soviet Union.
* Editor’s note: Back in 2019, during one of my last trips to Nicaragua, I got the chance to visit the GLONASS system—just the outside, mind you—alongside a group of Russian visitors. From the moment I saw it, the place felt straight out of a spy thriller, like something you’d expect in a secret agent’s world.