Russian ambassador to Venezuela, Sergey Melik-Bagdasarov, announced this Sunday that the governments of both countries are developing steps to connect Venezuela to the Mir (Russian) payment system.
He assured the possibility of using a card that would be useful to serve the travel industry, adding that “the parties are developing steps in this direction, although it is too early to speak of concrete dates.”
Recently, the Minister of People’s Power for Tourism, Ali Padrón, during a visit to Moscow, stated that the government of President Nicolás Maduro plans “to resume tourist trips with the use of a payment instrument such as the Mir card and all the possible elements that allow Russian tourists to visit Margarita Island and other regions of Venezuela”.
This way, Moscow and Caracas, both in the sight of the global financial system, are looking for alternatives to avoid the Western economic blockade.
The Mir payment system is a Russian analogue of the international Visa and MasterCard payment systems. It was created out of the need to seek a sovereign system after in 2014, after the start of the war in Donbas and the reunification of Russia with Crimea, the Visa and MasterCard systems blocked, without notice, the operations with bank cards of some Russian banks.
