Moscow, April 17. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is visiting Brazil today as part of a tour that will also take him to Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, his closest allies in Latin America.
The tour will kick off today in Brazil and run until the 21st, his department confirmed in a statement.
“For us, Latin America is a friendly region, one of the training centers of the multipolar world, with which Russia seeks to maintain a dynamic dialogue and to develop constructive cooperation free from any foreign imposition”, underlined the Foreign Affairs spokesperson, María Zajárova. .
The head of Russian diplomacy will have an “intense” program during his visit to the four Latin American countries, which includes meetings with the leaders of the four countries and negotiations with their counterparts, Foreign Affairs said.
Lavrov visits the region with a specific program aimed at increasing mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba in the fields of politics, trade and economy, education , culture, humanities and other fields, he explained.
In addition, Russia plans to focus the negotiations on strengthening the international law of the modern world on the basis of the UN Charter, Moscow stressed.
Last Thursday, Lavrov wrote two articles in the Brazilian newspaper “Folha de Sao Paulo” and the Mexican magazine “Divers of the News” before his visit to Latin America.
In these articles, he highlighted in particular the strategic relationship with Brasilia, Caracas, Havana and Managua.
“The rapidly changing geopolitical landscape opens up new possibilities for the development of mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and Latin American countries. The latter are playing an increasingly important role in the multipolar world,” he said. -He underlines.
Lavrov assures that Moscow does not want Latin America and the Caribbean to become a space of antagonism between powers, since it bases its foreign policy not on ideology, as was the case with the Soviet Union, but on pragmatism.
As an example, he pointed out that, despite sanctions and political pressure, Russian exports to the region increased by 3.8%, while wheat supplies increased by 48.8%.
Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to Moscow when he received in the Kremlin the special adviser for international affairs of the Brazilian presidency, Celso Amorim.
Lavrov’s visit to Brazil comes after Lula’s visit to China, where he again pleaded for peace in Ukraine.
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Madurdo has in turn offered Putin “full support” since the start of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine in February 2022.
For his part, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel showed his support for Putin in his confrontation with the West, by visiting Russia in December 2022, after which he also condemned the arrest warrant issued against the leader of the Kremlin by the International Criminal Court.
Finally, at the end of March, the Nicaraguan Foreign Minister, Denis Moncada, met Lavrov in Moscow, before whom he defended Moscow’s right to guarantee “its integrity and its security”.
In the new Russian foreign policy, marked by growing political, military and economic antagonism with the West over Ukraine, the Latin American region is one of the priority regions. ECE
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