Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks to soldiers while attending a military exercise in Turiamo, Venezuela on February 3, 2019.
MOSCOW, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) -- Russia supports a settlement plan for Venezuela, proposed by Uruguay and Mexico, but does not accept proposals by the European Union and condemns U.S. threats to invade the Latin American country, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday.
"We will uphold international law and support the initiatives taken by individual Latin American countries, in particular, Mexico and Uruguay," Lavrov spoke to students at Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in Kyrgyzstan's capital of Bishkek.
"They are aimed at creating the conditions for a national dialogue with the participation of all political forces in Venezuela," he said, according to an official transcript on the Russian Foreign Ministry's website.
Unfortunately, Europe is imposing a slightly different configuration of international mediation, Lavrov said.
According to him, the European Union has proposed to create a contact group made of eight of its members and a comparable number of Latin American countries, but Russia, China and the United States have not been invited to join it.
Lavrov noted that the EU proposed to include in the group countries which eight days ago demanded that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announce presidential election by Monday.
This means that on Monday these mediators will have to recognize Maduro's opponent Juan Guaido as a new legitimate acting president, Lavrov said.
"This is no way to mediate. This is called an ultimatum and not an attempt to find a common denominator," he said.
Lavrov recalled that the United States did not hide the fact that it wanted to change the regime in Venezuela at any cost, keeping the option of military intervention on the table.
"I think it goes without saying that it undermines all the foundations of international law," Lavrov said.
The opposition led by Guaido refuses to begin a dialogue, ultimately demanding the departure of Maduro and the transfer of power to opposition forces, he said, adding that this is not a dialogue, but imposing one's unilateral will.
"The fact that this is being done with direct indulgence from Washington, and now also Europe, exposes those alleged values in international politics that our Western colleagues profess," Lavrov said.
