‘Russia wants Venezuela for Ukraine’: Ex-adviser predicted Trump-Putin deal in 2019

Seven years before US President Donald Trump invaded Venezuela to oust longtime leader Nicolás Maduro, one of his former top officials responsible for Russia said that Vladimir Putin had sought to strike a deal about a Ukraine-Venezuela swap.

Under the deal, Russia —Maduro’s biggest backer— would allow the United States to do as Trump wished in Venezuela in exchange for Trump allowing Putin to do as he wished in Ukraine, according to Fiona Hill, a former deputy assistant and senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council (2017–19).

In her testimony to the US Congress in 2019, Hill said the Trump–Putin deal rested on the United States pursuing the ‘Monroe Doctrine’.

In his second term, Trump has formalised the Monroe Doctrine and carved out spheres of influence with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping whereby Trump has sought Russian and Chinese non-intervention in the Americas in exchange for Russia and China operating freely without US containment in Ukraine and Taiwan respectively.

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‘Very strange Venezuela–Ukraine swap arrangement’

Referring to the Russian outreach to the Trump administration between March and May 2019, Hill said that Putin wanted a “very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine” under which they would stay out of each other’s neighbourhoods.

If the Trump administration were to exert some semblance of the Monroe Doctrine —Russia keeping out of America’s backyard— the trade-off would be the United States staying out of Putin’s backyard in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, according to Hill.

As for the exact Russian message, Hill said, “They were basically signalling: ‘You know, you have your Monroe Doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. We, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine.’”

To stress the need for such a mutually beneficial deal, Russia had deployed hundreds of operatives to Venezuela to beef up the security of Maduro’s government, according to Hill.

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The implication of such an outreach was that if Trump wanted Russia to withdraw such support to Venezuela, he would need to withdraw US support to Ukraine. And that is exactly what Trump tried to do later that year.

In one of the biggest scandals of his first term, Trump had illegally withheld $400 million in congressionally approved aid to Ukraine and pressured Ukraine that the aid, as well as a meeting at the White House, would not be cleared until Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy opened an investigation into the Biden family’s business and the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine —not Russia— interfered in the 2016 presidential election.