UNITED NATIONS, September 28. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has rejected allegations about his meeting with Carlos Vecchio, a representative of Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido as an absolute lie.
"It is an undiluted lie," he said on Friday at a news conference after his speech at the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
"They [representatives of the Venezuelan opposition] are learning from the Americans: first they tell a lie and them try to use it to demonstrate that Russia has allegedly abandoned the Venezuelan government," he noted. "It is vile, dishonest and not worthy of a man."
Guido said on September 23 he had sent a delegation to the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly to meet with delegates from supporting nations.
The political situation in Venezuela aggravated after Juan Guaido, a Venezuelan opposition leader and speaker of the National Assembly, whose appointment to that position had been cancelled by the country’s Supreme Court, had declared himself interim president at a rally in the country’s capital, Caracas, on January 23. On the same day, the United States recognized him as an interim president, and the countries of the Lima Group (excluding Mexico) and the Organization of American States followed suit. Venezuela's incumbent President Nicolas Maduro blasted the move as an attempted coup and announced cutting diplomatic ties with the United States. Most European Union member states recognized Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president. Russia, Belarus, Bolivia, Iran, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Syria and Turkey voiced support for Maduro.