The New York Times:

An oil tanker called “Fortune” has sailed into Venezuela from Iran, the first of five ships expected to arrive in a nation so starved of gasoline that the docking of a single tanker was hailed on Monday by government officials as a victory.

The move represented a deepening of economic relations between Venezuela and Iran, two pariah states run by authoritarian leaders subject to punishing sanctions by the United States government. Representatives of both nations cast the transaction as a sign of strength.

“Thanks Iran,” Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, tweeted on Sunday, adding that amid U.S. opposition “only the brotherhood of free peoples will save us.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department, Morgan Ortagus, criticized the move, accusing the Maduro government of being a “criminal organization” that used illegally obtained gold to purchase fuel from Tehran. But she did not say whether the U.S. would attempt to block the shipments, or if it would respond with further sanctions on either nation.

“Venezuelans need free and fair presidential elections leading to democracy and economic recovery,” she said, “not Maduro’s expensive deals.”

Risa Grais-Targow, a Venezuela analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, said that the oil shipment highlighted the increasingly parallel economic and political goals of the two nations, as well as the U.S. government’s increasingly limited options to obstruct their relationship.

Venezuela needs gasoline and has gold. Iran has oil but needs cash. Both Venezuela and Iran are eager to punch back at the Trump administration. And the U.S. government, distracted by the coronavirus pandemic and having already issued harsh sanctions, is left with few retaliatory options beyond military intervention.

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