The statement comes after US Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams pledged that Moscow “will pay a price” for last week’s arrival of Russian military planes in Venezuela. The Russian Foreign Ministry in turn noted that Moscow had not violated either international or Venezuelan law with its actions.
Military and technical cooperation between Moscow and Caracas is geared at boosting the operational readiness of the Venezuelan army, the country’s Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez underscored on Friday.
“It is no secret to anyone that our country has been maintaining military and technical collaboration with Russia since 2001, but when they Russia’s representatives paid a visit to Venezuela, a scandal occurred. No one should worry about our bilateral cooperation,” Lopez was quoted by the Venezuelan Defence Ministry as saying.
In this context, he pointed out that no one is expressing concern about the ever-increasing activity of the US military near the Venezuelan border.
“There is no sign of scandal when US military aircraft land in Cucuta Colombia or when electronic surveillance of the US Air Force around our territory increases 800 percent. Nobody speaks out when there are attempts to undermine Venezuela’s sovereignty,” Lopez noted.
His remarks came shortly after US Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would soon announce Washington’s response to last week’s arrival of Russian military planes in Venezuela.
“We have a very nice options paper of the various things that can be done in US-Russia relations. There are a lot of things we can do in economic terms, in terms of sanctions. There’s a lot of things that are on the list. So, The Russians will pay a price for this”, Abrams warned.
The US President’s National Security Adviser John Bolton, for his part, cautioned countries “external to the Western Hemisphere” against deploying military forces in Venezuela or “elsewhere in the hemisphere”. He warned that Washington would consider such military deployments provocations and described them as a “direct threat to international peace and security in the region”.