The Russian embassy in Venezuela announced today through a Facebook post that its specialists, in the country since March 23 of this year, left today. The post was made on the embassy’s official Facebook page.
In the post, the embassy acknowledges that the personnel arrived in the country three months ago–in March. The embassy also argues in the post that these individuals were not soldiers.
Below, the post:
The Russian personnel arrived in Venezuela on March 23 of this year aboard a Russian Air Force Il-62M with the registration number RA-86496. Three days ago, on June 23, that same airplane returned to Venezuela.
This morning, RA-86496 took off from Venezuela heading east, likely to retrace its route back towards Russia:
Guaido Appears in Video Talking to Armed Men
A video shared by the opposition’s official press account apparently shows Juan Guaido talking to a group of men, at least one of whom was armed, who were allegedly in the process of kidnapping members of his entourage.
According to a thread on the Centro de Comunicacion Nacional page, Guaido and his entourage were moving along the Francisco Fajardo highway in Caracas when a “a group of unidentified men with weapons” attempted to “kidnap” some of Guaido’s team with the goal of taking them to the DGCIM headquarters.
The DGCIM is the Direccion General de Contraintelligencia Militar (General Directorate for Military Counterintelligence).
In that same thread, the opposition shared a video showing Guaido talking to a group of men, at least one of whom is clearly armed with a rifle. Below, the video:
Based on the tweets from the account, it appears as if Guaido’s entourage was able to drive away from the scene intact.
Speaking during a press conference this afternoon, Guaido provided more details on the event. He said:
They claimed to have orders from superiors to take with them some of the people from my team. Presumably, they were agents with the General Directorate for Military Counterintelligence.
Guaido lamented the fact that Venezuelan authorities–dressed in civilian clothing and without any kind of identification, as they were in this case–act like “gangs”.
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