Newsman: The highest-ranking Americans for the first time in years have visited Venezuela over the weekend. Biden administration officials traveled to Venezuela for talks on potentially allowing the country to sell its oil on the international market, helping to replace Russian fuel. Venezuela’s government released two Americans on Tuesday. The government of President Nicolas Maduro released Gustavo Cárdenas, one of six U.S. Citgo executives detained in 2017, and Jorge Alberto Fernández, who The New York Times says is a Cuban American tourist arrested under terrorism charges for bringing a drone into Venezuela. The Times first reported the news of the pair’s release
Senior Biden administration officials — including the National Security Council’s director for the Western Hemisphere, Juan Gonzalez, and the US special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, Roger Carstens — were dispatched to Caracas over the weekend for talks. Aside from sanctions relief and oil, they also discussed American citizens currently detained in Venezuela who the US wants to see freed. They include two Green Berets accused of plotting to remove Maduro and a group of energy executives arrested in 2017.
One day before the trip, the US made a strange move: The Treasury Department quietly announced a general license — allowing transactions that would otherwise would be prohibited — for a Russian oligarch who is a big investor in Venezuela’s energy market and has close relations with the Maduro regime, according to the announcement posted on the Office of Foreign Assets Control website. The oligarch — Alisher Burhanovich Usmanov — is also an ally of Putin.
The Treasury Department said that all of his personal assets had been blocked and there would likely be more sanctions to come.
“We are going to work with our allies and partners to design a set of mitigations that allow us to target companies under Usmanov’s control without driving up the price of commodities like nickel, which could inadvertently enrich him,” said a Treasury Department spokesperson.
Washington imposed sanctions on Venezuelan oil in 2019 and closed its embassy in Caracas after deeming Maduro’s election victory in 2018 to be a sham. A US official said Venezuela would need to take several steps before sanctions were lifted, though didn’t specify the conditions.
US imports from Russia make up a small slice of the energy universe — roughly 8% in 2021, of which only about 3% was crude oil. White House economic officials have been engaged for more than a week in how to manage any decision to cut off those imports, officials say. The Department of Energy reported that in the last two weeks of February, Russian oil imports dropped to zero as US companies cut ties with Russia, effectively implementing their own ban.
