The Vice President for Defense and Sovereignty, General-in-Chief Vladimir Padrino López, stated this Thursday that “Venezuela was the laboratory for using unknown weapons,” referring to the military aggression carried out by the United States on January 3, 2026, which left more than one hundred dead, including civilians and military personnel, and culminated in the illegal kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.
During the handover ceremony for the command of the military academies, held at Fort Tiuna, Caracas, Padrino López pointed out that the weapons used “had never before been used on a battlefield,” as publicly acknowledged by US President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“In this very place where we are standing, a military aggression was committed by the world’s leading nuclear power, the most lethal in the world. As President Donald Trump stated explicitly and clearly yesterday from Davos: they used weapons that no one else in the world possessed,” the high-ranking Venezuelan officer affirmed.
He added that “those weapons, that technology they used against our people on January 3, 2016, have turned out to have made Venezuela the testing ground for that aggression, which ended in what we already know: the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Dr. and Deputy Cilia Flores.”
Padrino López also instructed Major General Pérez La Rosa, rector of the Bolivarian Military University of Venezuela (UMBV), to conduct a review of the Ayacucho Transformation Plan to adjust the capabilities of the military education system “within the framework of the country’s independent and anti-imperialist character.”
“War is on everyone’s mind today. So, war is, I can say, a cognitive fact that must be studied. We must prepare the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) for the new challenges of this century,” he emphasized.
The Vice President for Defense and Sovereignty reiterated that the FANB maintains its honor and dignity intact and demanded the immediate return of the Head of State and his wife to the homeland.
On January 3, 2026, the United States perpetrated an illegal military aggression against Venezuela, which included bombings in various parts of Caracas and in areas of the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira.
The attack left at least 100 dead and a similar number of wounded, and culminated in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, in a flagrant violation of all norms of international law and the principles established in the Charter of the United Nations.
IMAGE CREDIT: “War is now in the minds of each one of us. So, war is today, I can say, a cognitive fact that must be studied. We must prepare the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) for the new challenges of this century,” said General Padrino López. Photo EFE.
[ SOURCE: teleSUR ]
