According to the readout, Putin thanked Trump for information — “transmitted through the channels of U.S. special services†— that “helped thwart terrorist acts in Russia.â€
The readout noted that the two presidents also discussed issues of mutual interest, agreeing to “continue bilateral cooperation in combating terrorism.†The Russian government news agency TASS, citing a spokesman from the FSB intelligence agency, reported that two Russian nationals were plotting terrorist attacks in St. Petersburg over the New Year holiday but were detained thanks to the information shared by the U.S.
NOW: While @realDonaldTrump is busy elsewhere, The Kremlin has released a transcript of a phone call between Trump and Putin. Today is one for history: Russia is supplying news to the U.S. through its official filter before our own president. pic.twitter.com/kUBnMnmMYX
— Brian J. Karem (@BrianKarem) December 29, 2019
On one end of the line was Venezuela’s socialist president, the pariah leader of a disintegrating economy whom President Trump’s administration was seeking to isolate.
On the other end: the U.S. president’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.).
Both were part of a shadow diplomatic effort, backed in part by private interests, aimed at engineering a negotiated exit to ease President Nicolás Maduro from power and reopen resource-rich Venezuela to business, according to people familiar with the endeavor.
Sessions had served as emissary in the back-channel effort, visiting Maduro in Caracas that spring. The phone call, which Giuliani joined, was a follow-up to that visit, Sessions’s spokesman Matt Mackowiak told The Washington Post.
New conflicts in the rest of the world may be looming large, but one in the United States’ own backyard is about to get more dangerous. Despite U.S.-led sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), oil from the country is still flowing onto world markets. A central facilitator of the exports is Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, which has been accepting Venezuelan crude as a form of loan repayment. In this way, Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing a leading role in keeping Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro afloat. As long as he does, current U.S. sanctions policy will do little to force a change in Venezuela, which is why Washington needs to rethink its strategy for dislodging the Venezuelan leader—and soon.