SMART MOVE: Russia reportedly helped Venezuela launch its petro cryptocurrency to skirt US sanctions.

An executive at a Russian state bank told Time that senior advisers in the Kremlin oversaw the development of the petro and that Russian president Vladimir Putin signed off on the project in 2017. “People close to Putin, they told him this is how to avoid the sanctions,” the executive told Time. “This is how the whole thing started.”

Earlier this week, the Trump administration issued an executive order prohibiting US citizens from purchasing the petro, which Maduro hopes will raise $6 billion and help shore up the country’s failing economy. Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, has suffered from hyperinflation as a result of government mismanagement and US sanctions. The US has also frozen assets of four current and former officials of the Venezuelan government.

Cryptocurrencies could be an effective form of skirting sanctions. Time reports that Russia floated the idea of creating a digital version of the ruble, but Russia’s central bank said it would risk destabilizing the ruble itself.

“So Russia made its stronghold here in Venezuela,” Armando Armas, an opposition member of Venezuela’s parliament, the National Assembly told Time. “Now they are using Venezuela as a guinea pig for their experiment.”

All that might be true, and yet still not the whole story. If I were Putin, I’d want to help keep Maduro in power for as long as possible by almost any means available. So long as Venezuela remains socialist, the Venezuelan oil industry will continue to underperform — which means higher prices and less competition for Russian oil.