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What Russia's Venezuela helicopter school signalled in April 2019
Summary
A retrospective on Russia's helicopter training facility in Venezuela, alongside two Ukrainian news items from the same days.
What did Russia's new helicopter training facility in Venezuela mean for relations between Moscow and Caracas? On 3 April 2019, the question was fresh: a day earlier, on 2 April, Russia had opened the facility, and Russian state-owned Rostec was to train Venezuelan pilots to operate Mi-35M gunships and transport helicopters.
The timing mattered. The opening came after the White House warned Moscow against sending troops or military equipment to Venezuela. Training pilots is not the same as deploying troops, but the project put Russian military expertise on Venezuelan soil just after that warning.
Closer to home
In Ukraine, the news of those days was of a different kind. On 31 March 2019, Boryspil international airport began operating a second terminal, Terminal F, which was to be used for low-cost carriers and charter flights.
On 30 March 2019, Oleksandr Gvozdyk beat Doudou Ngumbu by technical knockout and kept his WBC title.
Looking back
The Venezuelan project was an early marker of how Russia and the United States were positioning themselves around Caracas. Whatever followed, the sequence from 2 April 2019 was clear: a warning from Washington, then a Russian training facility with a state-owned company at its centre.
