International support. Brazilian MP Artur du Val said he was in Ukraine to make Molotov cocktails to supply the country’s army in the face of a Russian invasion.
“I never thought that one day I would be making Molotov cocktails for the Ukrainian army,” said this deputy from the state of São Paulo in an Instagram video. An aide to an MP in parliament confirmed that Artur du Val was indeed in Ukraine and that he should return to Brazil this weekend.
This message, published on Thursday evening, is illustrated with a photograph of him sitting on the ground next to dozens of crates filled with glass bottles.
“We made a lot of Molotov cocktails. There were more than 75 thousand of them in the room where we were,” the deputy said in a video also published on Instagram and filmed on the border of Ukraine and Slovakia.
Jair Bolsonaro’s speech on neutrality
From the start of the conflict, Artur du Val has criticized the position of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has demonstrated his “neutrality” by not condemning the offensive launched by his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, as most world leaders have done. Despite Jair Bolsonaro’s “neutrality” speech, Brazil on Wednesday voted in favor of a UN General Assembly resolution strongly condemning Russia’s offensive in Ukraine. The President of Brazil visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow a week before the invasion and expressed his “solidarity” to him.
A member of the Movement for a Free Brazil (MBL), a right-wing political movement that made a name for itself by organizing mass demonstrations in 2016 to demand the resignation of left-wing ex-president Dilma Rousseff, the 35-year-old MP indicated earlier in the week that she would travel to Europe to support the Ukrainians.
MBL launched an online kitten and said it had raised 180,000 reais (about 32,000 euros) intended to buy food for the population of Ukraine.