Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the aid at a joint press conference with Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld in Quito on Thursday, asserting there are “narco-terrorist organizations that operate in the region that are using Ecuador as a transit zone, and that needs to be confronted.”

The U.S. will also provide $6 million worth of unmanned aerial vehicle drones to Ecuador’s navy. Mr. Rubio said Washington is also designating the Los Lobos and Los Choneros drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move that opens more legal tools for U.S. and Ecuadorian authorities to track and eliminate the leaders of the cartels.

The announcements came days after the U.S. military carried out a strike on an alleged cartel boat traveling in the Caribbean, killing 11 people. Mr. Rubio said the U.S. had received intel that the vessel was piloted by the Venezuelan drug cartel Tren de Aragua and was headed for the U.S. He pointed to the FTO designation from February when questioned by the media over the strike’s legality.

European leaders collectively spent more on importing Russian oil last year than they did on financial aid for Ukraine, which totals roughly $21.7 billion, according to data from the Center for Research Energy and Clean Air.

That hung in the backdrop Thursday as Mr. Trump took European leaders to task for their nations’ purchases of Russian oil, opening a new battlefront in the so-called economic war he’s waging on Moscow to end the war in Ukraine. In a video call from the White House, Mr. Trump urged the U.S. allies to stop buying Russian oil and also to put pressure on China, which has emerged as one of the largest purchasers of fossil fuels from Moscow.

Mr. Trump opened a separate front in his economic war last week, imposing a 50% tariff on most U.S. imports from India, making good on his threat to punish India over its purchases of Russian oil.

Momentum is growing on Capitol Hill behind a bipartisan push to repeal the Caesar Act, which imposed heavy U.S. sanctions on former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s regime and is now creating hurdles for the post-Assad government because it blocks international aid and investment from flowing into the war-torn Mideast nation.

Sources tell Threat Status a group of Syrian-American lawyers, doctors, business leaders and activists — the Syrian American Alliance For Peace & Prosperity (SAAPP) — made headway on an effort to repeal the 2019 law in meetings with several lawmakers from both parties in congressional offices this week.

In May, Mr. Rubio announced a waiver of Caesar Act sanctions for 180 days. The waiver will expire in November unless Congress permanently repeals the law or the administration issues new waivers. A June statement by Rep. Joe Wilson, South Carolina Republican, said the situation is “creating economic uncertainty which will harm efforts to reduce the massive humanitarian and economic hardship in Syria, which has been ravaged by years of war.”

Neither Russia nor Ukraine is scoring significant wins on the battlefield, and the war between those two countries, now well into its fourth year, will only end at the negotiating table, says U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker.

“It’s been going on too long,” Mr. Whitaker said in an exclusive video interview with The Washington Times’ Tim Constantine. “There are no battlefield gains. It’s not going to be won on the battlefield. It’s going to be won at the negotiating table. And so President Trump continues to create circumstances to bring both sides closer.”

The president expressed public frustration this week that a meeting between Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has yet to materialize. Mr. Whitaker’s comments highlight what has become increasingly apparent to military insiders and national security analysts: Short of some unexpected game-changer, there’s little expectation for a major shift on the battlefield in favor of either side.

The Russian president “lives and breathes the KGB” and “is always looking to develop rapport and find some superficial common ground with his interlocutors to create the illusion of trust and friendship, which he uses to try to manipulate relationships in his favor,” writes Daniel N. Hoffman, a retired clandestine services officer and an opinion contributor to The Times’ Threat Status.

He notes how Mr. Putin gave U.S. Special Envoy Steven Witkoff the Russian Order of Courage medal for onward delivery to the CIA’s deputy director for digital innovation, Juliane Gallina, whose 21-year-old son was killed fighting in a Russian military unit against Ukraine. “Knowing Mr. Witkoff tragically lost a son as a result of the opioid epidemic,” Mr. Hoffman writes, “Mr. Putin rightly hedged that he’d deliver the medal to Ms. Gallina and her husband rather than refuse it.

“Mr. Putin, whose deeper objective was far more duplicitous, wanted to use the medal to raise the public profile of Ms. Gallina’s heartbreaking family tragedy,” Mr. Hoffman writes. “He might have even believed his ruse would cause some personal animus between Mr. Witkoff and CIA leadership, thereby resulting in disrupting the flow of CIA intelligence to support Mr. Witkoff’s tireless efforts to bring an end to the war in Ukraine.”

• Sept. 5 — Truth and Trust in the AI Supply Chain, Atlantic Council
 
• Sept. 9 — Will ‘Peace’ in Ukraine Lead to More War? Chatham House
 
• Sept. 9 — From Monroe to the Golden Age: Charting America’s Path in Latin America, Alexander Hamilton Society
 
• Sept. 20-21 — AFA National Convention 2025, Air & Space Forces Association
 
• Sept. 22-23 — Cyber Defense Summit 25, Mandiant & Google Threat Intelligence
 
• Sept. 23-25 — National Cyber Summit