@geniusmusing I think some competitive sense may be necessary to motivate nations to fund space exploration, especially the parts that might not give some sort of return in a relatively short time frame. "Venus is a Russian planet" may just be the equivalent of "The US will land a human on the moon within a decade and before anyone else can do so" ... it motivated us to expend resources on NASA that might not otherwise have been made available.

I think the telling thing is what happens after they land a few probes and discover rare earth minerals or something else that is valuable and in limited supply on earth.

That said, it is not a good precedent for them to make that claim without other nations countering with something like "all of space and its objects are there for the benefit of all, not any single country".