Kremlin: Russia has contact with Venezuela’s Juan Guaido
Venezuela’s self-declared interim president Juan Guaido has been trying to contact Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT in an interview.
He said that Moscow has never ceased its dialog with Venezuela. “We are actively talking to all members of the Venezuelan political landscape – the government, the opposition, we even have people from Juan Guaido coming to us,” he noted.
Lavrov said that Moscow has explained to him “the inadmissibility of attempts to resolve internal problems by provoking external intervention”.
In Lavrov’s opinion, the situation in Venezuela is now “changing for the better”. Initially there were several associations trying to resolve the Venezuelan crisis. One of them was an international contact group promoted by the European Union. “This contact group was united around what was effectively an ultimatum: we will immediately hold presidential elections again, and then all will be well,” he said.
An association with representatives from Bolivia, Mexico, Uruguay and countries from the Caribbean Community proposed dialog between the Venezuelan government and the opposition.
“After unsuccessful attempts to externally provoke another ‘color revolution’ there, the situation has now transitioned to what we call the ‘Oslo process’. This is a process aimed to achieve agreements and compromises between the government and the opposition. In other words, common sense is gradually starting to prevail,” Lavrov remarked.
He also expressed the hope that an agreement “that makes everyone happy” will be achieved at the end of the negotiation process. “That would be in the interests of the Venezuelan people, first and foremost,” he said.
Recently Venezuela’s incumbent president Nicolas Maduro announced that the government was in constant negotiations with the opposition. Norway has been acting as an intermediary between the conflicting sides.
Government and opposition representatives engaged in talks in Barbados at the start of July. Maduro, who did not get into the details, said that the discussion had touched on six points that “address all the country’s problems”. Guaido, in turn, said that the goal was to resolve the Venezuelan crisis “once and for all”.