Eight Venezuelan soldiers have been killed in clashes with armed groups operating on the Colombian border, doubling the toll since an offensive against the combatants started in March, the defense ministry in Caracas said Wednesday.

Venezuela's military clashed Sunday with an armed group near the frontier with Colombia, the mayor of a Colombian border town said.

Anyier sits at the side of the road gasping for breath as the beating sun and 3,700-meter (12,000-foot) altitude take their toll.

The European Union declared Venezuela's ambassador to the bloc "persona non grata" on Thursday in a tit-for-tat move after Caracas expelled its own envoy.

Venezuela ended 2020 with inflation of nearly 3,000 percent, the central bank said Thursday.

The oil-rich country is mired in the worst economic crisis of its modern history and struggling through its seventh straight year of recession.

Venezuela jailed two officials from the state oil company PDVSA for five years for providing the US with "strategic and sensitive" details of its sanctions-hit oil operations, prosecutors said Friday.

Having weathered punishing sanctions and thinly veiled US invasion threats, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro hopes to take congress back from the opposition in Sunday's elections.

Venezuela's president and top ministers are responsible for probable crimes against humanity, UN investigators said on Wednesday in a report the country's government quickly labeled as "riddled with falsehoods."

President Nicolas Maduro said Friday that an "American spy" had been arrested near two Venezuelan refineries, after authorities foiled a plot to "cause an explosion" at another oil complex.

"Yesterday we captured... an American spy who was spying in Falcon state on the Amuay and Cardon refineries," Maduro said in a televised address.

Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaido called Monday on the armed forces to back a boycott of December's contested legislative polls and help escalate international pressure on President Nicolas Maduro.