In 2019, Russian officials privately signaled to the Trump administration that the Kremlin might abandon its support for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in exchange for a free hand in Ukraine, according to Fiona Hill, who served as President Donald Trump’s top Russia adviser at the time.
The Russians “repeatedly floated the idea of a very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine,” Hill testified during a closed-door congressional hearing that year.
Her comments resurfaced this week on social media following the U.S. military operation that captured Maduro.
Hill stated that Moscow conveyed this proposal indirectly, placing articles in Russian media that invoked the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.
That U.S. policy opposed European interference in the Americas while pledging American non-interference in Europe—a framework Trump himself later cited to justify U.S. actions in Venezuela.
The implied swap, according to Hill, would have updated the old doctrine: Russia would cede influence in Washington’s hemisphere if the U.S. ceded influence in Moscow’s.
By James Kisoo
