Led by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has returned to the international stage and aims to once again be an active protagonist on major global issues, including the war in Ukraine, which is about to celebrate its one-year anniversary. Brazil’s new president intends to forge an international alliance to reach a negotiated solution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an initiative that contrasts with the prevailing stance in the West, which focuses on arming Ukrainian troops. Lula categorically refuses to use Brazilian ammunition in combat. He wants to join forces with countries like China, India and Indonesia so that both sides can negotiate with more momentum than before.
The Brazilian President is a lover of multilateral diplomacy, in keeping with his country’s tradition. And he believes there is an urgent need to talk more about peace, about a negotiated exit after the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine, than about tanks and fighter jets. This conviction gave rise to a third path, which he has already proposed by telephone to French President Emmanuel Macron and this Monday in person to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and which he intends to build during his next trips abroad to Washington and Beijing.
Lula is scheduled to meet President Joe Biden at the White House on the 10th, and in March he will make an official visit to China — undated — to meet Xi Jinping. Also on the Brazilian agenda is a trip by Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira to New Delhi in March to attend one of the preparatory meetings for the G-20 that India will host later this year.
“No one cares about this war,” Lula said when he appeared Monday with German Scholz, the first foreign president to visit him in Brasilia since he took power a month ago. “Just as we created the G-20 after the economic crisis in 2008, we should create a G-20 for the war in Ukraine, a G-10 or G-15,” said the Brazilian, before pointing out some potential members : “I think that China, India, Indonesia … can play an important role in this club of those who want to make peace”.
Turkey would be another of them, according to Celso Amorim, Lula’s top foreign policy adviser and foreign minister in his first phase, who has explained the logic behind this initiative. “Somebody has to talk to the Russians, there’s no point just talking to them [Volodímir] Zelensky. It has to be someone who has the ability to influence and persuade. Obviously, China seems to be the most capable country, but it cannot do it alone,” he told a local TV station this week. The idea is to forge an alliance with other countries that, due to their size and strategic importance, can change the current dynamic. “We need fresh air. We cannot just have the United States and the European Union on one side and Russia on the other.”
Leftist Lula has maintained the neutral stance of his predecessor, far-right Jair Bolsonaro, in the war in Ukraine. The right-wing extremist visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow on the eve of the start of the military offensive on Ukrainian territory. Although Brazil has condemned the Russian invasion at the United Nations, its most common position in this conflict is abstention. It is not taking part in sanctions against Russia, a key supplier of vital fertilizers to powerful agriculture.
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In this sense, Lula’s Brazil refuses to get involved in the war in Ukraine. He doesn’t even want to be involved indirectly. “Brazil has no interest in sending ammunition for the Ukraine-Russia war,” Lula told Scholz, without clarifying whether the foreign minister had asked him for permission to use Brazilian ammunition in the tanks that Germany was sending to the US Ukraine will send, as published by Folha de S. Paulo. . Based on this information, Lula argued that provoking the Russians was not worth it. Both countries are partners in the BRICS, a club of declining emerging economies formed at the end of Lula’s previous term. In addition to Brazil and Russia, it consists of India, China and South Africa.
Lula condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine but continues to insist that “two don’t fight if one doesn’t want to”. And, in his opinion, it is time for the international community to do its utmost to end a war whose origins, he says, are not entirely clear: “Some say because NATO settled on the Russian border has, the others because Ukraine has invaded the EU [Kiev presentó su solicitud el pasado junio, meses después de la invasión rusa]apart from the land that Russia wants to occupy in Ukraine…”.
International relations professor Guilherme Casarões believes that this initiative is the result of Lula’s desire to “use his good relations with Vladimir Putin, with China and his ability to engage in dialogue with Western powers, including the US,” to to resume the role of “speaker of global causes” that he already exercised in his previous phase, and to build a legacy of this third presidential term that is driven by international rather than national issues, given the polarization suffered by Brazil For the Getulio Vargas Foundation specialist, it is not easy to make the proposal to set up a G20 to stop the war in Ukraine flourish because “at this point in time, the interests of NATO and Russia hardly exist appear compatible with each other.” But Lula and Brazil want to try to go down the path of promoting negotiation and conciliation, which is her trademark.
“Brazil is a country of peace,” emphasized the Brazilian to Scholz, his last war was against Paraguay at the end of the 19th century. He later took part in the Allied effort in World War II. Lula also took the opportunity to recall in his press conference with Scholz that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Brazil spoke out against with him in the presidency, was based on “the chemical weapons lie”.
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