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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said he is ready for talks with opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaido.
Mr Maduro told the Russian state news agency Ria that he would discuss the crisis gripping the country with the opposition, with the participation of international mediators.
“I am ready to sit at the negotiation table with the opposition for us to talk for the benefit of Venezuela, for the sake of peace and its future,” he said.
Whether Mr Guaido is willing to enter talks is another matter.
In an exclusive television interview on Tuesday with Sky’s chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay he said meetings with Maduro were pointless as they would make no headway.
Mr Maduro’s government has been trying to increase the pressure on Mr Guaido with Venezuela’s Supreme Court freezing his bank accounts and banning him from leaving the country.
The Maduro regime is under attack both at home and abroad, with protests across the country leaving at least 40 dead and more than 700 detained since 23 January. Meanwhile the US has imposed stiff sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry, its main source of income.
The restrictions placed on Mr Guaido by the Supreme Court, regarded as the judicial voice of the Maduro government, lend a thin veneer of respectability to the attempts to undermine him.
High Court president Maikel Moreno said that Mr Guaido “is prohibited from leaving the country until the end of the (preliminary) investigation” without clarifying what is being investigated.
However Mr Guaido faces a much more serious threat than a frozen bank account and a travel ban, as was made clear during his interview with Stuart Ramsay.
The hoops the Sky team had to go through just to meet Mr Guaido, and the extreme nervousness of his security staff made it clear that he believes his life is in danger, something he confirmed during the interview.
“My generation in Venezuela grew up in dictatorship and we’ve had to deal with losing friends, to protest, see them imprisoned or seeing them being tortured – that’s the reality,” he said.
He also admitted that his stance places others, including his family, in harm’s way as well, but said that were part of the reality of opposition politics in Venezuela.
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Skynews
