Category World News

As the Trump administration mounts pressure on Caracas and continues to bolster US forces on Venezuela’s borders, the US Department of the Treasury has announced new sanctions against a number of Venezuelan presidents’ relatives and associates.

More than 100 people have been killed by US military attacks on boats off the nation’s coast, which were continued as a result of the sanctions announced on Friday. Venezuelan oil tankers have also been seize by the US military, and all ships entering and leaving Venezuelan ports are being blocked by US naval forces.

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent stated in a statement that “Maduro and his criminal accomplices threaten our hemisphere’s peace and stability.”

Bessent continued, “The Trump Administration will continue to target the organizations that support his illegitimate dictatorship.”

On December 11, a previous round of US sanctions that also targeted six Venezuela-flagged oil tankers and shipping companies named seven people who are relatives or associates of Malpica Flores, a nephew of Maduro, and Ramon Carretero, a Panamanian businessman, were named in the new sanctions.

Flores, who is one of three of Maduro’s nephews by marriage and is known as “narco-nephews” by the US Treasury Department, is wanted because he “has been repeatedly linked to corruption at Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, SA,” the Treasury said in a statement.

Bessent claimed that this was the reason for enraging sanctions against additional family members and associates of the president because it was not immediately clear how Flores’ involvement in Venezuela’s state-run oil company related to “propping up Nicolas Maduro’s rogue narco-state.”

The US has argued that the country’s military action in the area, including the strikes on ships in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, which international law experts claim constitute extrajudicial killings, is primarily due to its efforts to combat drug trafficking.

Venezuela’s oil reserves, which are the largest in the world, appear to be the Trump administration’s main priority, despite repeated references to drug trafficking. Since the US began to impose sanctions on the nation during the first Trump administration, the reserves have largely been untapped.

Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide and adviser to the homeland security, claimed Washington owns Venezuela’s oil last week.

Miller claimed on X that the oil industry in Venezuela was the result of American sweat, ingenuity, and labor. He continued, “The largest recorded theft of American wealth and property was its tyrannical expropriation.”

Venezuela’s oil industry is the target of US sanctions, which have caused an economic crisis and increased unease with Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 and who has led the country since.

Maduro, for his part, has accused the Trump administration of “fabricating a new eternal war” aimed at “regime change” and seizing Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

Venezuela is also subject to targeted sanctions that the European Union renewed last week through 2027.

The first European sanctions were implemented in 2017 and include travel bans and asset freezes for people connected to state repression.

The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts was written in metal on the building’s exterior on Friday, according to workers.

The center’s updated exterior designation, which honors the leadership of President Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy’s enduring legacy, was shared on social media.

The decision has been criticized by former president John F. Kennedy’s family, who was shot by an assassin in 1963, as well as historians and Democratic lawmakers, who claim that only a passing of Congress could change the name of the center, which was designated as a living memorial to Kennedy the year after his death.

“The Kennedy Center was given that name by law.” Former House of Representatives historian Ray Smock told the Associated Press (AP) news agency that a change in the name would necessitate a revision of that 1964 law. The board of directors of the Kennedy Center is not a legislative body. Smock remarked that Congress makes laws.

According to the AP, the law’s naming of the center specifically forbids the board of trustees from embossing someone else’s name on the building’s exterior and from putting that person’s name on the building’s exterior.

When Trump’s term as president ends, Kerry Kennedy, a niece of former president John F. Kennedy, announced in a social media post that she would do so herself.

I’m going to pick up a pickaxe and remove those letters from that building in three years and one month, but I’ll need assistance lowering the ladder. Do you belong? She used X to write.

In the history of the US, it is unprecedented to name a national institution after a president in office. Following the passing of the renowned US leaders, monuments like the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and even the Kennedy Center were named after their names.

Former Congressman Joe Kennedy III, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, added that the Kennedy Center was a “living memorial to a fallen president” and could not be changed, “no matter what the circumstances are.”

Trump reportedly called the Kennedy Center’s new name “too woke” and claimed on Thursday that he was surprised by it.

He has previously mentioned that he wants to name his organization in the future, and he was recently appointed to the board of directors.

On Saturday, December 20, 2018, this is how things are going.

Fighting

• In a post on Telegram, Governor Oleh Kiper wrote that seven people were killed and 15 were hurt in Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports in Odesa.
• Russian ballistic missiles, according to Kiper, were used in the “massive” attack, which Kiper claimed was directed at trucks that had caught fire.
• Odesa city has been experiencing persistent power outages since December 13 as a result of earlier Russian attacks, according to the Kyiv Independent news outlet.
• Vladyslav Hayvanenko, the acting head of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration, wrote on Facebook that Russian forces shelled homes, power lines, and a gas pipeline as they attacked Ukraine’s Dnipro region.
• After isolating Russian forces and continuing Russian claims that the city’s crucial urban center have been seized, Ukraine has regained control of almost all of Kupiansk, its northern city.

Aid

To meet Ukraine’s military and economic needs for the next two years, EU leaders agreed to offer the nation an interest-free loan worth $105.5 billion.
• Instead of using frozen Russian assets, EU leaders said diplomats, choosing to borrow cash from the capital markets to pay for Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

Diplomacy

Russian President Vladimir Putin blasted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for rejecting the possibility of renunciating the Ukrainian ally in his annual “results of the year” speech on Friday in Moscow.
• Zelenskyy’s statements indicate that he isn’t interested in discussing territorial issues, Putin said.
• The Russian president also criticized Europe’s handling of frozen Russian assets, blaming plans to use them to fund Ukraine as “robbery” rather than theft because it was being carried out in secret.
• Putin vowed to file legal action in courts that he described as “independent of political decisions,” saying, “Whatever they stole, they’ll have to give it back someday.”

talks on a ceasefire

• In a year-end speech in Washington, DC, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the Russian-led conflict with Ukraine had been resolved.
• The hardest issues are always the last ones, Rubio said to reporters, “I think we’ve made progress, but we still have a way to go.”
• Only a negotiated settlement, according to Rubio, and not the US, will be able to decide whether to end the conflict. “We don’t see surrender any time in the near future,” Rubio said.
• Rustem Umerov, a top Ukrainian negotiator, stated that the US and Kyiv had agreed to continue working together to achieve a ceasefire while he is in the US for talks about a ceasefire.
• Without providing further details, Umerov wrote on Telegram that “we agreed with our American partners about further steps and on continuing our joint work in the near future.” He continued, noting the outcome of the discussions with Zelenskyy.
• According to a Russian source, Putin’s special representative, Kirill Dmitriev, is visiting Miami for a meeting with Steve Witkoff, the US president’s son-in-law, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
• Following Witkoff and Kushner’s earlier this week-earlier discussions with Ukrainian and European officials in Berlin in an effort to reach a resolution to end the war, the two leaders met in Miami this weekend.
• Any negotiations between Dmitriev and Ukrainian negotiators currently present in the US were reportedly ruled out, according to the Russian source.

Regional security

• According to “initial findings” from an ongoing investigation, Turkiye’s Ministry of the Interior reported finding a Russian-made reconnaissance drone in the Kocaeli district of Kocaeli, in northwest Turkiye.
• The ministry stated in a post on X that an “unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) of the Russian-made Orlan-10 type, used for reconnaissance and surveillance, was discovered.
• Without providing further details, Turkiye’s Ministry of National Defense reported on Monday that it shot down a drone over Turkish airspace as it approached Turkish airspace.
• According to a report released on Friday by Ukraine’s Ukrinform news site, Turkiye informed both Kyiv and Moscow that they needed to “agitate cautiously” to prevent “negatively affecting security in the Black Sea.”