Russia Calls for Joint Front Against Western Sanctions

Date: 19 April 2023 - 22:04

News ID: ۱۱۴۱۹۵

CARACAS (Dispatches) --
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for independent countries to “join forces” against the “blackmail” of Western sanctions, as the longtime diplomat continued his tour of Latin America.
Discussing the war in Ukraine with Venezuelan counterpart Yvan Gil here, Lavrov referred to allies Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua as countries “that choose their own path.”
All are, like Russia, the subject of damaging economic sanctions, he said.
“It is necessary to join forces to counter the attempts of blackmail and illegal unilateral pressure of the West,” Lavrov said at a joint press conference with Gil.
Russia’s top diplomat is on a week-long Latin American tour that started in Brazil and will also take him to Nicaragua and Cuba -- where the leftist governments have hostile relations with the United States.
The White House on Monday -- the same day that President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with Lavrov in Brasilia -- criticized the Brazilian leader for saying that Washington was “encouraging the war” in Ukraine and that Kyiv shared blame for the conflict.
Lavrov also met with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who afterward tweeted that it was a “pleasant meeting that strengthened bilateral relations.”
At the bilateral level, Russia and Venezuela announced that they have signed agreements regarding oil and mining.
Lavrov later traveled to Cuba whose President Miguel Diaz-Canel visited Russia at the end of November, where he announced he had signed several agreements concerning oil supplies to the island.
Lavrov is expected to make a final stop in Managua, where he will meet with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
Russia and Venezuela reviewed some of their hundreds of bilateral agreements covering the financial,

energy, agricultural and other sectors.

“We fully support the position of our Venezuelan friends,” Lavrov said. “It is their country ... and we are going to support it in any way so that the Venezuelan economy becomes an independent economy from the pressures of the United States and other western actors.”

Officials reviewed some of the hundreds of agreements between both countries covering the financial, energy, agricultural and other sectors.

Gil and Lavrov said their countries are developing an alternative to SWIFT, the system that enables global financial transactions but to which key Russian banks lost access last year. Those banks were cut off as part of economic sanctions imposed on Russia at the start of the war in Ukraine last year.

Russia, along with China, is an unconditional ally of the Venezuelan government. Its support has allowed it to circumvent crippling economic sanctions meant to oust Maduro.