Lula ties up with Ukraine in search of greater international reputation

“Brazil is back,” he said Lula da Silva when he won the election in October. The president of the Latin American giant announced that his country is strongly returning to the international scene, after four years of certain isolationism with Jair Bolsonaro. Lula has always wanted Brazil, a demographic powerhouse, to have greater importance in world geopolitics. In recent weeks, it has embarked on a diplomatic offensive, trying to position itself as a mediator in the war in Ukraine, taking positions that have annoyed its Western partners.

It all started on April 6 when Lula said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “cannot want everything”, suggesting that he should cede the territory of Crimea to Russia. In the end, he irritated Kiev and the European Union and the USA.

The Brazilian president then traveled to Beijing to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, who also wants to mediate the conflict. There he said that Washington was encouraging the war in Ukraine. “USA. You have to stop fomenting war and start talking about peace,” he said, receiving a sharp response from the White House. “Brazil repeats Russian and Chinese propaganda without looking at the facts at all”noted US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby before Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared in Brasilia for a meeting with Lula.

A day after that visit, after criticism that came from Brussels, Lula expressly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but his equidistant position is still viewed with suspicion by Washington. “His tone was not neutral,” the White House said in full controversy.

This week, Lula visited Spain and Portugal, promoted his plan to create a “neutral G20”, a group of countries working to seek an end to the war in Ukraine, and once again condemned the Russian invasion, but assured that “it is now necessary to stop the war” and that is “useless to say who is right or wrong”. Brazil would have a dominant role in that G20, after promoting it, and would achieve the relevance that Lula seeks.

The president too trying to restart the BRICS group, an economic and commercial alliance of five emerging economies, consisting of your country, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It is so important to Lula that he appointed former president Dilma Rousseff, a person of the greatest trust, who is very respectable, as the new president of the BRICS bank.

His intention to position Brazil as a relevant actor in international politics goes back a long way. Since 2003, Lula has been repeating that the United Nations Security Council must have a permanent member from Latin America, and that this seat must be for his country.

The president claims that he does not transfer weapons to Ukraine or even sell them to allied countries because he does not want to contribute to the continuation of the conflict. According to Brazilian analysts, it risks damaging its relationship with the West. American President Joe Biden approved a few days ago the payment of 500 million dollars to the Amazon fund promoted by Lula, dispelling for the time being the ghosts that Lula’s position is reaching an ever-increasing tipping point.