Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov culminated a four-country tour of Latin America on Thursday in what was widely seen as Moscow’s latest bid to counteract Western sanctions over Russia’s policies in Ukraine and Crimea. Earlier this week, Lavrov met with heads of state Raúl Castro in Cuba, Juan Manual Santos in Colombia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Lavrov ended his trip Thursday after visiting Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina and meeting top officials at the Central American Integration System (SICA) in Guatemala City to discuss Russia’s relationship with Central America.
This is the second visit the foreign minister has paid to the region within the last year—in April 2014, barely a month after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he traveled to Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, and Peru. Several months later, in July 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin also made stops in Argentina, Cuba and Nicaragua prior to attending the BRICS international conference in Brazil.
Lavrov said that one of his main objectives in Havana on Tuesday was to discuss U.S. trade policies with the island. While he remarked that the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations is viewed positively by Russia , he also called for an immediate end to the U.S. trade embargo. Lavrov also declared Washington’s policies “totally inconsistent,” comparing the U.S. détente with Cuba to its tense relationship with Venezuela.
“Even as the U.S. was taking this step with Cuba, it was simultaneously pressuring Venezuela, declaring it a threat to U.S. national security. We would like the United States to stop looking for enemies in its geographical surroundings and listen to a unanimous voice of Latin America and the Caribbean Basin,” he stated.
Despite recent speculation that Nicaragua and Russia intend to re-establish military ties through Nicaragua’s purchase of Russian fighter jets, reports from the meeting in Managua on Wednesday did not include specifics about such negotiations. Instead, Ortega voiced a desire to collaborate on projects related to agriculture, transportation infrastructure, civil aviation, satellite navigation, and the pharmaceutical industry.
