Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Finland next week to discuss disagreements over the crisis in Venezuela, a US official said Thursday.
The two top diplomats will take up “a broad range of issues” when they meet on the sidelines of an Arctic Council meeting starting Monday in the northern Finnish city of Rovaniemi, the official said.
Meanwhile, Lavrov characterized a phone call with Pompeo about the situation in Venezuela as having elements of the surreal.
Lavrov made his comments Thursday in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, a day after he spoke with the top US diplomat about protests against embattled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“Pompeo phoned, called for us to refuse to support Maduro, called for Cuba and us not to interfere in the internal affairs of Venezuela. The whole story sounds quite surreal,” Lavrov said.
“If you count up all that official representatives of the American administration say about Venezuela, then you can pose questions endlessly and to all these questions the answer will be, to put it diplomatically: It’s untrue,” he said.
Pompeo claimed earlier that Maduro was ready to flee the South American country, but that unspecified Russians persuaded him to stay put.
On Thursday, Maduro called for military unity in an appearance with troops at the air base where opposition leader Juan Guaidó called for an uprising two days earlier.
Flanked by commanders, Maduro said the military must be prepared to combat “traitors” and that the opposition had sought to spark bloodshed in Caracas since security forces failed to respond to Guaidó’s bid to take power.
He spoke from the Carlota air base in the opposition’s stronghold in Caracas that was the epicenter of the short-lived uprising.
Guaidó, backed by a small contingent of security forces, called for the army to turn against Maduro on Tuesday. But police dispersed the crowds in clashes that lasted for hours.
Thousands of Venezuelans heeded the opposition’s call to fill streets around the nation a day later. On Thursday, the streets of the capital remained calm.
With Post wires
