How the Russians take a planet

Dmitry Rogozin says Putin owns Venus. By right of landing robots on it.

It's debatable legally. The US did most of the mapping, starting with Puerto Rico in 1967 (they found Maxwell) and especially with Magellan and Pioneer orbiters. Venera did help, da. But then we get into the question of to what extent was the Soviet Union, Russian; or a mostly-criminal enterprise of ethnics ruling over Russians. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev all end in the Ukraine -ev, nyet?

Less questionable is how Russia - or anyone - would enforce a claim on a whole planet. Unfortunately here I can find bottlenecks: SVL2 is one clear gateway. Unless / until Venus gets high-altitude warehouse-balloons and cheap propulsion into orbit.

Even getting there (cheaply or quickly) can be monopolised. There's a recurrent window of opportunity, called the Hohmann, from any orbit to another orbit. Say the Glorious Trump Space Force launches a payload from Earth (or the Moon, whatever). Russia's going to launch to the same trajectory. Likely at the same time. The same goes for the faster, more expensive trajectories but maybe here we can work around the schedule.

'Tis all so much wind until someone actually sends sufficient materiel over there to assemble colonies.