Russia, Venezuela to Expand Oil Sector Cooperation, Working on Pact to Circumvent Western Sanctions
from Sputnik News:
Russia and Venezuela have dramatically expanded economic, political and defense ties over the past two decades, with the United States placing crushing sanctions on the Latin American nation and repeatedly attempting to institute regime change in Caracas over the country’s attempts to secure independence from Washington’s influence.
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Moscow and Caracas will continue to expand their cooperation in the oil sector, and are working on new agreements to circumvent Western sanctions in finance and logistics, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Carlos Faria has indicated.
“As far as cooperation in the energy sector is concerned, it never stopped since the rapprochement between our countries. We are working on specific projects with Russian companies, and are continuing to deepen this work. We hope to reach an agreement on ways to circumvent the existing obstacles, to solve problems related to financial mechanisms,” Faria said, speaking to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on Monday.
Emphasizing Caracas’s “extremely negative view” of US attempts at sanctions pressure, Faria said that when it came to sanctioning Russia, Washington’s policy backfired and hit ordinary Americans and ordinary Europeans instead.
“The aim of these sanctions was not achieved. This is a very serious miscalculation, a miscalculation I would characterize as unforgivable. And the problems which the economies of the United States and the European Union have run into are the result of this miscalculation. Today, they do not know how to resolve the difficulties that have arisen, how to return life to normal. And I think this will certainly hit the people of these countries,” he said.
The foreign minister expressed hope that Moscow and Caracas can overcome roadblocks connected to US restrictions. “The conditions in which we found ourselves thanks to the actions of the US administration hindered the development of the oil industry,” Faria said, specifying that sanctions have affected investments, financing, loans, the purchase of equipment and spare parts.
Pointing to the alternative finance systems worked out by Russia, China and India to circumvent the West’s attempted “blockade” against Moscow, Faria noted that “more and more countries are interacting with Russia, and they are not afraid of the consequences they are being threatened with.”
