Russia Floated Venezuela-for-Ukraine Deal to Trump – Ex-Advisor

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.

The crisis followed a disputed 2018 presidential election that the US and other Western nations rejected as illegitimate.

Hill said the Kremlin conveyed the offer “informally” and suggested it may have been linked to the Burisma scandal, a case that led to Trump’s impeachment over efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to announce investigations involving Hunter Biden, the son of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

What did Hill say?

Hill brought up Venezuela in 2019 as she shifted from discussing the Burisma scandal during her testimony.

“And I was also told by Amos and other colleagues that they had some linkages, so I also want to, you know, get you to step back at this period,” Hill said, according to a transcript published by Politico.

Amos Hochstein was a senior vice president of marketing at US-based Tellurian, a liquified natural gas firm. He served as special envoy for international energy affairs at the US State Department under the Obama administration, and later as a supervisory board member of Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Naftogaz.

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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.

Trump boasted of his “Donroe Doctrine” – a wordplay on the Monroe Doctrine – following his 2026 raid on Venezuela that captured the nation’s leader Nicolás Maduro.

Hill said the proposal was communicated “informally” to the US via the media, where she was instructed by the then-Trump administration to “basically tell the Russians to knock this off.”

“And we were getting that sent to us, you know, kind of informally through channels. It was in the Russian press, various commentators,” she said.

“I was given a special assignment by the National Security Council with the agreement with the State Department to get the Russians to back off.”

Hill also said there were connections between the Ukrainian and Venezuelan energy sectors at the time, without elaborating.

“So, in the course of my discussions with my colleagues [REDACTED], I also found out that there were Ukrainian energy interests that had been in the mix in Venezuelan energy sectors as well as the names again of Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, and this gentleman Harry Sargeant came up. And my colleagues [REDACTED] said these guys were notorious in Florida and that they were bad news,” she said.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are Ukrainian-born businessmen who were associates of Rudy Giuliani and involved in efforts to press Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son; Harry Sargeant III is an American businessman and Republican donor who has been linked to political fundraising and lobbying, including US-Ukraine connections.

Russia has condemned the US’s raid on Venezuela and Maduro’s capture, with its foreign ministry saying that Venezuela “must be guaranteed the right to determine its own destiny without any destructive, especially military, interference from outside” in a statement.