President Donald Trump met Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez on the United Nations General Assembly sidelines—their first in-person encounter since U.S. forces raided Caracas, seized Nicolás Maduro, and Washington blessed Rodríguez’s National Assembly swearing-in.

Rodríguez said they discussed advancing cooperation in energy, mining, and security; Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles also attended. Rodríguez is due to address the Assembly on Wednesday. Maduro awaits trial in New York on drug-trafficking and related charges a short distance from the meeting site.

The political stakes are enormous: Rodríguez’s government has signed terms allowing U.S.-linked control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil—more than a fifth of reserves—with 100-year concessions on 17 fields that Trump previously called “the biggest oil deal in world history.” In Monday’s UNGA speech he said the United States and Venezuela control “more than 60%” of the world’s oil and that “to the victor belong the spoils.” U.S. sanctions on Rodríguez from 2018 were lifted in April; opposition leader María Corina Machado has repeatedly been barred from re-entering the country.

BBC, Reuters, AFP, and El País agree the meeting occurred and that oil-and-security cooperation topped the agenda. Conflict remains over legitimacy: Washington frames Rodríguez as a stabilizing interim partner; critics call the oil concessions a spoils arrangement after regime change and note Machado’s exclusion. For U.S. midterm politics, cheaper Venezuelan barrels are a promised energy win; for Latin America diplomacy, the meeting seals a thaw that remains bitterly contested at home in Caracas.