Russia Floated Venezuela-for-Ukraine Deal to Trump - Ex-Advisor [View all]

In her 2019 Congress testimony, Trump’s former advisor Fiona Hill said Russia floated the idea of a deal to swap Venezuela for Ukraine via informal communications.

Russia in 2019 reportedly floated a deal to the first-term Trump administration, offering US influence over Venezuela in exchange for Washington stepping away from Ukraine, according to testimony given to the US Congress at the time.

Fiona Hill, a former senior White House advisor on Russia and Europe, who later testified during US President Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, said the offer was made informally amid Venezuela’s 2019 political turmoil, marked by massive nationwide blackouts, food shortages and service disruptions that triggered widespread protests.

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Hill described the proposed deal as a “very strange swap arrangement.”

“This is, you know, March, April, into May, where we were having a standoff over Venezuela. And the Russians at this particular juncture were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine,” she said.

Hill likened Russia’s proposal to the US’s Monroe Doctrine, a policy from 1823 that sought to keep European powers out of the Americas.

“In other words, if we were going to exert some semblance of the Monroe Doctrine of, you know, Russia keeping out of our backyard, because this is after the Russians had sent in these hundred operatives essentially to, you know, basically secure the Venezuelan government and to preempt what they were obviously taking to be some kind of US military action,” she said.

“They were basically signaling: You know, you have your Monroe Doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. Well, you know, we have our own version of this. You’re in our backyard in Ukraine,” she added.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/67441