Venezuelan president Maduro says ready to meet Trump

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said on Tuesday he was ready to meet with his US counterpart Donald Trump in person.

"I’m ready to talk to US President Donald Trump. I would like it to be a face-to-face meeting between Donald Trump and Nicolas Maduro," he said in a state TV channel broadcast.

The Venezuelan leader also said that sanctions against his country were useless.

"Not only US sanctions are useless, they are also an award for revolutionaries, because they show that we are courageous, that we are on the right way, that we have not been led astray," he said.

The country’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said later in the day that the Venezuelan president was ready to meet as early as on Wednesday.

"If President Donald Trump wants to talk to President Nicolas Maduro, this can be arranged as early as tomorrow [on Wednesday]," the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry quoted Arreaza as saying in its Twitter.

Earlier in the day, the US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on Nicolas Maduro’s wife Cilia Flores, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, Minister of Communications and Information Jorge Rodriguez and Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez.

In the recent years, Venezuela has been living through an acute socio-economic crisis accompanied by hiking prices, food and medicines shortages and devaluation of the national currency. Hardships force many Venezuelans flee their homeland. According to the UN statistics, about 2.3 million people had fled Venezuela by June. People go mostly to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil.