Category: Business Wires

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia bombarded Ukraine with more than 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles in its latest nighttime attack on the Ukrainian power grid, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday, as Moscow gives no public sign that it’s willing to end the invasion of its neighbor anytime soon.

The attack knocked out heating to more than 5,600 apartment buildings in the capital, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Nearly 80% of the affected buildings had recently had their heating supply restored after a major Russian barrage on Jan. 9 that plunged thousands of people into a dayslong blackout, he said.

Ukraine is enduring one of its coldest winters for years, with temperatures in Kyiv falling to minus 4 Fahrenheit. At the same time, Russia has escalated its aerial attacks on the electricity supply, aiming to deny Ukrainians heat and running water and wear down their resistance almost four years after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials are trying to keep up the momentum of U.S.-led peace talks. A Ukrainian negotiating team arrived in the United States on Saturday. Their main task was to convey how the relentless Russian strikes are undermining diplomacy, according to Zelensky.

The Ukrainian leader said last week that the delegation would also try to finalize with U.S. officials documents for a proposed peace settlement that relate to postwar security guarantees and economic recovery. If American officials approve the proposals, the U.S. and Ukraine could sign the documents at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, he said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev plans to meet with some American representatives at Davos.

He refused to name the officials Dmitriev would meet with, but media reports said they would include U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Attacks described as ‘cruel’

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said his country needs urgent assistance and additional sanctions on Russia to make Moscow change course.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “barbaric strike this morning is a wake-up call to world leaders gathering in Davos,” Sybiha said on X.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said that he was outraged by the repeated large-scale attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which especially affect children, older people, and those with disabilities.

The strikes “can only be described as cruel,” he said in Geneva. “They must stop. Targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure is a clear breach of the rules of warfare.”

Several electrical substations providing power vital for nuclear safety in Ukraine were affected, said Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Air defense systems are expensive

Ukraine’s air force command said that 27 missiles and 315 drones were shot down or jammed, while five missiles and 24 drones hit 11 locations.

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that its forces targeted Ukrainian military and industrial installations as well as energy and transport infrastructure used by the Ukrainian armed forces.

The constant attacks have stretched Ukraine’s air defenses and, according to Zelensky, some systems recently ran out of ammunition before a new shipment arrived.

The fight is also expensive: the air defense ammunition that Ukraine used against the Russian missiles overnight cost about 80 million euros ($93 million), Zelensky said.

Ukrainian air defenses are adopting a new approach, with the appointment of a new deputy air force commander, Pavlo Yelizarov, according to Zelensky.

“This system will be transformed,” he said late Monday, without providing details.

Ukraine relies on sophisticated air defense systems produced by Western countries, especially the U.S., to thwart Russia’s missile and drone attacks.

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will attend the Supreme Court’s oral argument Wednesday in a case involving the attempted firing of Fed governor Lisa Cook, an unusual show of support by the central bank chair.

The high court is considering whether President Donald Trump can fire Cook, as he said he would do in late August, in an unprecedented attempt to remove one of the seven members of the Fed’s governing board. Powell plans to attend the high court’s Wednesday session, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s a much more public show of support than the Fed chair has previously shown Cook. But it follows Powell’s announcement last week that the Trump administration has sent subpoenas to the Fed, threatening an unprecedented criminal indictment of the Fed Chair. Powell — appointed to the position by Trump in 2018 — appears to be casting off last year’s more subdued response to Trump’s repeated attacks on the central bank in favor of a more public confrontation.

Powell issued a video statement Jan. 11 condemning the subpoenas as “pretexts” for Trump’s efforts to force him to sharply cut the Fed’s key interest rate. Powell oversaw three rate cuts late last year, lowering the rate to about 3.6%, but Trump has argued it should be as low as 1%, a position few economists support.

The Trump administration has accused Cook of mortgage fraud, an allegation that Cook has denied. No charges have been made against Cook. She sued to keep her job, and the Supreme Court Oct. 1 issued a brief order allowing her to stay on the board while they consider her case.

If Trump succeeds in removing Cook, he could appoint another person to fill her slot, which would give his appointees a majority on the Fed’s board and greater influence over the central bank’s decisions on interest rates and bank regulation.

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian drone strikes damaged energy networks in Russia-occupied parts of southern Ukraine, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power on Sunday, according to Kremlin-installed authorities there.

Meanwhile, Moscow has kept up its hammering of Ukraine’s energy grid in overnight attacks that killed at least two people, according to Ukrainian officials.

More than 200,000 households in the Russia-held part of Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region had no electricity on Sunday, according to the Kremlin-installed local governor.

In a Telegram post, Yevgeny Balitsky said that nearly 400 settlements have had their supply cut, because of damage to power networks from Ukrainian drone strikes.

Russia has hammered Ukraine’s power grid, especially in winter, throughout the nearly four-year war. The strikes aim to weaken Ukrainians’ will to resist in a strategy that Kyiv officials call “weaponizing winter.”

Russia targeted energy infrastructure in Odesa region overnight on Sunday, according to Ukraine’s Emergency Service. A fire broke out and was promptly extinguished.

At least six people were wounded in the Dnipropetrovsk region from Russian attacks, the emergency service said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Telegram post that repairing the country’s energy system remains challenging, “but we are doing everything we can to restore everything as quickly as possible.”

He said that two people were killed in overnight attacks across the country that struck Sumy, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Khmelnytskyi, and Odesa.

In total, more than 1,300 attack drones, 1,050 guided aerial bombs, and 29 missiles of various types were used by Russia to strike Ukraine this week, Zelensky said.

U.S. talks

“If Russia deliberately delays the diplomatic process, the world’s response should be decisive: more help for Ukraine and more pressure on the aggressor,” Zelensky said.

He spoke the day after a Ukrainian delegation arrived in the United States for talks on a U.S.-led diplomatic push to end the war.

On Friday, Zelensky said that the delegation would try to finalize with U.S. officials documents for a proposed peace settlement that relate to postwar security guarantees and economic recovery.

If American officials approve the proposals, the U.S. and Ukraine could sign the documents next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Zelensky said at a Kyiv news conference with Czech President Petr Pavel. U.S. President Donald Trump plans to be in Davos, according to organizers.

Russia would still need to be consulted on the proposals.

Drones strike Russian Caucasus

Separately, in Russia’s Caucasus Mountains, two children and an adult were wounded overnight as debris from a Ukrainian drone fell on a five-story residential building in North Ossetia, according to the regional governor.

Seventy people had to be evacuated from the building, in the town of Beslan, and there was damage to its roof and windows, Gov. Sergei Menyaylo said in a Telegram post on Sunday morning.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that its forces shot down or suppressed 63 Ukrainian drones overnight over Russia and the occupied Crimean Peninsula. One person was hospitalized in Russia’s Krasnodar region east of Crimea following a drone strike, local authorities said.

Nuclear plant repairs

Ukrainian crews have started repair work on the backup power line connecting the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to the power grid, under a ceasefire brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based U.N. organization said in an X post on Sunday.

The fate of the plant, occupied by Russia and the largest in Europe, is a central issue in ongoing U.S.-brokered peace talks.

“Crucial repair works on the essential back up Ferosplavna-1 330 kV power line connecting Ukraine’s ZNPP to the grid have begun under another IAEA-brokered ceasefire,” the agency said in the post.

The 330-kilovolt power line, which was damaged and disconnected because of fighting, is crucial to supplying the plant with electricity.

Excessive speeding was so common on parallel one-way streets passing a massive electronics plant that Indianapolis residents used to refer to the pair as a “racetrack” akin to the city’s famous Motor Speedway a few miles west.

Originally two-way thoroughfares, Michigan and New York streets switched to opposite one-way routes in the 1970s to help thousands of RCA workers swiftly travel to and from their shifts building televisions or pressing vinyl records. But after the RCA plant closed in 1995, the suddenly barren roads grew even more enticing for lead-footed drivers — until last year, when city officials finally converted them back to two-way streets.

“The opening and conversion of those streets has just been transformative for how people think about that corridor,” said James Taylor, who runs a nearby community center.

Embracing the oft-repeated slogan that “paint is cheap,” transportation planners across the U.S. — particularly in midsize cities — have been turning their unidirectional streets back to multidirectional ones. They view the step as one of the easiest ways to improve safety and make downtowns more alluring to shoppers, restaurant patrons and would-be residents.

A street design U-turn

Dave Amos, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at California Polytechnic State University, said almost no major streets in the U.S. originated as one-way routes. Two-way streets were the standard, before mass migration to the suburbs prioritized faster commutes over downtown walkability.

“One-way streets are designed for moving cars quickly and efficiently,” Amos said. “So when you have that as your goal, pedestrians and cyclists almost by design are secondary, which makes them more vulnerable.”

But the propensity to speed isn’t the only reason one-way streets are viewed as less safe.

Wade Walker, an engineer with Kittelson & Associates who has worked on street conversion projects in Lakeland, Fla., Lynchburg, Va.;, and Chattanooga, Tenn., said there is a misperception that one-way streets are safer because people on foot only have to look one direction to see the incoming traffic. The confusion arises when one-way streets combine with two-way streets to form a city grid, he said.

Pedestrians crossing a signalized intersection of two-way streets can expect to encounter vehicles in a certain sequence: those turning left on green, traveling straight, and turning right on red. But when one-way streets are included, there are 16 potential sequences depending on the type and direction of the roads that intersect, Walker said.

“It’s not the number of conflicts, it’s the way those conflicts occur,” he said.

One way to divide a community

Louisville, Ky., about two hours south of Indianapolis, has been restoring one-way streets to their original two-way footprints. The state is leading an ongoing project to reconvert a stretch along Main Street that passes such landmarks as the Louisville Slugger Museum, the KFC Yum! Center arena, and a minor-league baseball stadium.

One of the city’s biggest redesigns is happening this year in the predominantly Black western part of the city, where many roads changed to one-way routes in the 1970s to feed a new interstate bridge over the Ohio River. However, it decimated neighborhoods and cut off the once-thriving community from downtown.

“All those mom-and-pop shops and local businesses over time kind of faded because that connectivity got taken away,” said Michael King, the city’s assistant director of transportation planning. “It just feels more like, ‘This is a road to get me through here pretty quickly.’”

Within three years after some of Chattanooga’s two-way streets were transformed into unidirectional ones, business vacancies skyrocketed and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga became “landlocked” to prevent students from having to cross a dangerous road, Walker said.

In 2022, almost two decades after the road was redesigned, he returned to find the college campus had expanded across it and business construction had surged.

Converting streets and skeptics

When Lynchburg, Va., launched a long-discussed plan to change its downtown Main Street back to two ways, Rodney Taylor voiced concerns that it would doom his restaurant by blocking delivery vehicles. After the city completed the section in 2021, he acknowledged the fears were unfounded.

“An important thing to do is to admit when you’re wrong,” he said. “And I was just flat-out wrong.”

Many residents also changed their tune in Austin, Texas, when the city began reconverting some of the one-way streets in its urban core, said Adam Greenfield, executive director with Safe Streets Austin.

“It just worked,” said Greenfield, who is now lobbying the city to do away with all its one-way streets. “That’s what you’ll find with these conversions — they’ll be done and then instantly people will be like, ‘Why didn’t we do this 20 years ago?’”

After Chicago went the opposite direction last year and suddenly changed some of its two-way streets to one-way in the busy West Loop restaurant district, a politician representing an adjacent area got numerous calls from confused constituents.

“Even if this was the right move to make these streets one-way, it certainly doesn’t make sense to not ask the opinion of the neighbors,” Alderman Bill Conway said.

Opportunity in Indianapolis

Now that Indianapolis has finished the redesigns for Michigan and New York streets, there are 10 other conversions on tap next, said Mark St. John, chief engineer for the city’s Department of Public Works. The total cost for those projects is estimated at $60 million, with around $25 million of that from a 2023 federal grant.

James Taylor, who runs the community center near the old RCA plant, said it is too early to know the full impact. Some business owners, however, have signaled construction plans along the redesigned streets, which Taylor says still feel a little strange.

“I’ve been driving around that neighborhood for 30 years,” he said. “It’s all kind of familiar, but you’re coming at it from a whole different perspective.”

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump announced the audacious capture of Nicolás Maduro to face drug trafficking charges in the U.S., he portrayed the strongman’s vice president and longtime aide as America’s preferred partner to stabilize Venezuela amid a scourge of drugs, corruption, and economic mayhem.

Left unspoken was the cloud of suspicion that long surrounded Delcy Rodríguez before she became acting president of the beleaguered nation earlier this month.

In fact, Rodríguez has been on the radar of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for years and in 2022 was even labeled a “priority target,” a designation DEA reserves for suspects believed to have a “significant impact” on the drug trade, according to records obtained by The Associated Press and more than a half dozen current and former U.S. law enforcement officials.

The DEA has amassed a detailed intelligence file on Rodríguez dating to at least 2018, the records show, cataloging her known associates and allegations ranging from drug trafficking to gold smuggling. One confidential informant told the DEA in early 2021 that Rodríguez was using hotels in the Caribbean resort of Isla Margarita “as a front to launder money,” the records show. As recently as last year she was linked to Maduro’s alleged bag man, Alex Saab, whom U.S. authorities arrested in 2020 on money laundering charges.

The U.S. government has never publicly accused Rodríguez of any criminal wrongdoing. Notably for Maduro’s inner circle, she’s not among the more than a dozen current Venezuelan officials charged with drug trafficking alongside the ousted president.

Rodríguez’s name has surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations, several of which remain ongoing, involving agents in field offices from Paraguay and Ecuador to Phoenix and New York, the AP learned. The AP could not determine the specific focus of each investigation.

Three current and former DEA agents who reviewed the records at the request of AP said they indicate an intense interest in Rodríguez throughout much of her tenure as vice president, which began in 2018. They were not authorized to discuss DEA investigations and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The records reviewed by AP do not make clear why Rodríguez was elevated to a “priority target,” a designation that requires extensive documentation to justify additional investigative resources. The agency has hundreds of priority targets at any given moment, and having the label does not necessarily lead to being charged criminally.

“She was on the rise, so it’s not surprising that she might become a high-priority target with her role,” said Kurt Lunkenheimer, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who has handled multiple cases related to Venezuela. “The issue is when people talk about you and you become a high-priority target, there’s a difference between that and evidence supporting an indictment.”

Venezuela’s Communications Ministry did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The DEA and U.S. Justice Department also did not respond to requests for comment. Asked whether the president trusts Rodríguez, the White House referred AP to Trump’s earlier remarks on a “very good talk” he had with the acting president Wednesday, one day before she met in Caracas with CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Almost immediately after Maduro’s capture, Trump started heaping praise on Rodríguez — this past week referring to her as a “terrific person — in close contact with officials in Washington, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The DEA’s interest in Rodríguez comes even as Trump has sought to install her as the steward of American interests to navigate a volatile post-Maduro Venezuela, said Steve Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas.

“The current Venezuela government is a criminal-hybrid regime. The only way you reach a position of power in the regime is by, at the very least, abetting criminal activities,” said Dudley, who has investigated Venezuela for years. “This isn’t a bug in the system. This is the system.”

Those sentiments were echoed by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who met with Trump at the White House Thursday in a bid to push for more U.S. support for Venezuelan democracy.

“The American justice system has sufficient information about her,” said Machado, referring to Rodríguez. “Her profile is quite clear.”

Rodríguez, 56, worked her way to the apex of power in Venezuela as a loyal aide to Maduro, with whom she shares a deep-seated leftist bent stemming from her socialist father’s death in police custody when she was only 7 years old. Despite blaming the U.S. for her father’s death, she steadily worked while foreign minister and later vice president to court American investment during the first Trump administration, hiring lobbyists close to Trump and even ordering the state oil company to make a $500,000 donation to his inaugural committee.

The charm offensive flopped when Trump, urged on by Rubio, pressured Maduro to hold free and fair elections. In September 2018, the White House sanctioned Rodríguez, describing her as key to Maduro’s grip on power and ability to “solidify his authoritarian rule.” She was also sanctioned earlier by the European Union.

But those allegations focused on her threat to Venezuela’s democracy, not any alleged involvement in corruption.

“Venezuela is a failed state that supports terrorism, corruption, human rights abuses, and drug trafficking at the highest echelons. There is nothing political about this analysis,” said Rob Zachariasiewicz, a longtime former DEA agent who led investigations into top Venezuelan officials and is now a managing partner at Elicius Intelligence, a specialist investigations firm. “Delcy Rodríguez has been part of this criminal enterprise.”

The DEA records seen by AP provide an unprecedented glimpse into the agency’s interest in Rodríguez. Much of it was driven by the agency’s elite Special Operations Division, the same Virginia-based unit that worked with prosecutors in Manhattan to indict Maduro.

One of the records cites an unnamed confidential informant linking Rodríguez to hotels in Margarita Island that are allegedly used as a front to launder money. The AP has been unable to independently confirm the information.

The U.S. has long considered the resort island, northeast of the Venezuelan mainland, a strategic hub for drug trafficking routes to the Caribbean and Europe. Numerous traffickers have been arrested or taken haven there over the years, including representatives of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel.

The records also indicate the feds were looking at Rodríguez’s involvement in government contracts awarded to Maduro’s ally Saab — investigations that remain ongoing even after President Joe Biden pardoned him in 2023 as part of a prisoner swap for Americans imprisoned in Venezuela.

The Colombian businessman rose to become one of Venezuela’s top fixers as U.S. sanctions cut off its access to hard currency and Western banks. He was arrested in 2020 on federal charges of money laundering while traveling from Venezuela to Iran to negotiate oil deals helping both countries circumvent sanctions.

The DEA records also indicate agents’ interest in Rodríguez’s possible involvement in allegedly corrupt deals between the government and Omar Nassif-Sruji, the brother of her longtime romantic partner, Yussef Nassif. Nassif-Sruji and Nassif did not respond to emails and text messages seeking comment.

Companies registered by the two brothers in Hong Kong received more than $650 million in Venezuelan government contracts between 2017 and 2019 to import food and dialysis medicine, according to copies of the contracts obtained in 2021 by Venezuelan investigative journalism outlet Armando.info.

Taken together, the DEA investigations underscore how power has long been exercised in Venezuela, which is ranked as the world’s third most corrupt country by Transparency International. For Rodríguez, they also represent something of a razor-sharp sword over her head, breathing life to Trump’s threat soon after Maduro’s ouster that she would “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she didn’t fall in line. The president added that he wanted her to provide the U.S. “total access” to the country’s vast oil reserves and other natural resources.

“Just being a leader in a highly corrupted regime for over a decade makes it logical that she is a priority target for investigation,” said David Smilde, a Tulane University professor who has studied Venezuela for three decades. “She surely knows this, and it gives the U.S. government leverage over her. She may fear that if she does not do as the Trump administration demands, she could end up with an indictment like Maduro.”

President Donald Trump said Saturday that he would charge a 10% import tax starting in February on goods from eight European nations because of their opposition to American control of Greenland, setting up a potentially dangerous test of U.S. partnerships in Europe.

Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands. and Finland would face the tariff, Trump said in a social media post while at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The rate would climb to 25% on June 1 if no deal was in place for “the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland” by the United States, he said.

The Republican president appeared to indicate that he was using the tariffs as leverage to force talks with Denmark and other European countries over the status of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark that he regards as critical to U.S. national security.

“The United States of America is immediately open to negotiation with Denmark and/or any of these Countries that have put so much at risk, despite all that we have done for them,” Trump said on Truth Social.

The tariff threat could mark a problematic rupture between Trump and America’s longtime NATO partners, further straining an alliance that dates to 1949 and provides a collective degree of security to Europe and North America. Trump has repeatedly tried to use trade penalties to bend allies and rivals alike to his will, generating investment commitments from some nations and pushback from others, notably China.

Trump is scheduled to travel on Tuesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he likely will run into the European leaders he just threatened with tariffs that would start in little more than two weeks.

There are immediate questions about how the White House could try to implement the threatened tariffs because the European Union is a single economic zone in terms of trading, according to a European diplomat who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. It was unclear, too, how Trump could act under U.S. law, though he could cite emergency economic powers that are currently subject to a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.

Trump has long said he thinks the U.S. should own the strategically located and mineral-rich island, which has a population of about 57,000 and whose defense is provided by Denmark. He intensified his calls a day after the military operation to oust Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro earlier this month.

The president indicated the tariffs were retaliation for what appeared to be the deployment of symbolic levels of troops from the European countries to Greenland, which he has said was essential for the “Golden Dome” missile defense system for the U.S., He also has argued that Russia and China might try to take over the island.

The U.S. already has access to Greenland under a 1951 defense agreement. Since 1945, the American military presence in Greenland has decreased from thousands of soldiers over 17 bases and installations to 200 at the remote Pituffik Space Base in the northwest of the island, the Danish foreign minister has said. That base supports missile warning, missile defense and space surveillance operations for the U.S. and NATO.

Resistance has steadily built in Europe to Trump’s ambitions even as several countries on the continent agreed to his 15% tariffs last year in order to preserve an economic and security relationship with Washington.

‘Important for the whole world’

Earlier Saturday, hundreds of people in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, braved near-freezing temperatures, rain and icy streets to march in a rally in support of their own self-governance.

Tillie Martinussen, a former member of Greenland’s parliament, said the push to preserve NATO and Greenland’s autonomy were more important than facing tariffs, though she added that she was not dismissing the potential economic impact.

“This is a fight for freedom,” she said. ”It’s for NATO, it’s for everything the Western Hemisphere has been fighting for since World War II.”

Thousands of people also marched through Copenhagen, many of them carrying Greenland’s flag. Some held signs with slogans such as “Make America Smart Again” and “Hands Off.”

“This is important for the whole world,” Danish protester Elise Riechie told The Associated Press as she held Danish and Greenlandic flags. “There are many small countries. None of them are for sale.”

The rallies occurred hours after a bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers, while visiting Copenhagen, sought to reassure Denmark and Greenland of their support.

NATO training exercises

Danish Maj. Gen. Søren Andersen, leader of the Joint Arctic Command, told the AP that Denmark does not expect the U.S. military to attack Greenland, or any other NATO ally, and that European troops were recently deployed to Nuuk for Arctic defense training.

He said the goal is not to send a message to the Trump administration, even through the White House has not ruled out taking the territory by force.

“I will not go into the political part, but I will say that I would never expect a NATO country to attack another NATO country,” he said from aboard a Danish military vessel docked in Nuuk. “For us, for me, it’s not about signaling. It is actually about training military units, working together with allies.”

The Danish military organized a planning meeting Friday in Greenland with NATO allies, including the U.S., to discuss Arctic security on the alliance’s northern flank in the face of a potential Russian threat. The Americans were also invited to participate in Operation Arctic Endurance in Greenland in the coming days, Andersen said.

In his 2½ years as a commander in Greenland, Andersen said that he hasn’t seen any Chinese or Russian combat vessels or warships, despite Trump saying that they were off the island’s coast.

But in the unlikely event of American troops using force on Danish soil, Andersen confirmed that Danish soldiers have an obligation to fight back.

‘Almost no better’ ally

Trump has contended that China and Russia have their own designs on Greenland and its vast untapped reserves of critical minerals. He said recently that anything less than the Arctic island being in U.S. hands would be “unacceptable.”

The president has seen tariffs as a tool to get what he wants without having to resort to military actions. At the White House on Friday, he recounted how he had threatened European allies with tariffs on pharmaceuticals and he teased the possibility of doing so again.

“I may do that for Greenland, too,” Trump said.

Earlier in the week, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland met in Washington with Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

That session did not resolve the deep differences, but it did produce an agreement to set up a working group — on whose purpose Denmark and the White House then offered sharply diverging public views.

European leaders have said that it is only for Denmark and Greenland to decide on matters concerning the territory, and Denmark said this week that it was increasing its military presence in Greenland in cooperation with allies.

“There is almost no better ally to the United States than Denmark,” said Sen. Chris Coons, (D., Del.), while visiting Copenhagen with other members of Congress. “If we do things that cause Danes to question whether we can be counted on as a NATO ally, why would any other country seek to be our ally or believe in our representations?”