And there it is

RT was right.

UPDATE1/27:  (Or maybe not.)

The US state department has urged its citizens to “strongly consider” leaving Venezuela and ordered out non-emergency government staff as the head of the country’s armed forces warned of a civil war sparked by a US-backed “criminal plan” to unseat Nicolás Maduro.

[...]

In a significant blow to Venezuela’s newly energized opposition, the defence minister declared unwavering support for “our commander-in-chief, the citizen Nicolás Maduro”.

“We members of the armed forces know well the consequences [of war], just from looking at the history of humanity, of the last century, when millions and millions of human beings lost their lives,” [defence minister, Vladimir] Padrino added, flanked by the top brass of Venezuela’s armed forces.

Further bolstering Maduro’s position, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, spoke to the Venezuelan leader by telephone and issued his first comments on the crisis, which he insisted was “provoked from abroad”, according to a Kremlin statement.

  The Guardian

The two Vlads.

In his speech, Padrino described Juan Guaidó’s decision to declare himself Venezuela’s president on Wednesday as a shameful and laughable fact but one that risked unleashing a wave of bloodshed. “I have to alert the people of Venezuela to the severe danger that this represents to our integrity and our national sovereignty.”

Facing “a criminal plan that flagrantly threatens the sovereignty and independence of the nation”, Padrino said the armed forces would remain loyal to Maduro. Dissent would not be tolerated, he added ominously.

[...]

“What we’re focusing on today is disconnecting the illegitimate Maduro regime from the source of its revenues,” [US National Security Adviser John] Bolton told reporters. “We think consistent with our recognition of Juan Guaidó as the constitutional interim president of Venezuela that those revenues should go to the legitimate government. It’s very complicated. We’re looking at a lot of different things we have to do, but that’s in the process.”

"The illegitimate Maduro regime." Maduro was democratically elected.

The EU has called for new elections but most member states have not followed Washington in recognising Guaidó, the head of the opposition-led national assembly.

The UK however, broke European ranks on Thursday and sided with the US.

“This regime has done untold damage to the people of Venezuela, 10% of the population have left Venezuela such is the misery they are suffering,” the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said in a statement issued in Washington before a meeting with the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and Vice-President Mike Pence.

“So the United Kingdom believes Juan Guaidó is the right person to take Venezuela forward. We are supporting the US, Canada, Brazil and Argentina to make that happen.”

The statement stopped just short of echoing US language on recognising Guaidó, however. “It is UK policy to recognise states, not governments,” a British official said.

[...]

The US has called for a UN security council emergency session on Saturday to discuss the crisis in Venezuela, although Russia opposes a debate on what Moscow says is an internal Venezuelan matter.

A Venezuelan monitoring group claimed at least a dozen people had been killed in the unrest.

[...]

This week, authorities arrested 27 national guardsmen who tried to launch an uprising against Maduro.

[...]

Salas, the author of Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know, said he was troubled by the potential for bloodshed in the days and weeks ahead.

“The risk is that this escalates into an open confrontation [between pro- and anti-Maduro groups] and then you have a foreign intervention,” he said.

“That is something that would be not only dangerous but catastrophic for Venezuela. And for Latin America it would be a return to the 1980s Reagan era of civil wars and conflicts that proved devastating to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and those countries of the region. We had hoped to be beyond that.”