Lula and Ukraine – 02/25/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Lula’s stance on the Ukraine War got off to a bad start, reflecting a common bias in the Brazilian left a year ago. While the discourse has always been in favor of peace, criticism of Zelensky was more frequent than criticism of Putin, and the conceptual frame of reference seemed to be “if the US supports one guy, we support the other.”

But 2022 was a long year, which showed that the current international clash is more complex than that.

Putin welcomed Bolsonaro when the rest of the world treated him like toxic waste. Its great ally in the European Union, Viktor Orbán, is a great inspiration for Bolsonaristas. The Putin government’s anti-LGBT stances are very popular with right-wing zealots in the West.

At the same time, the position of Biden and the European Union against the Bolsonaro coup was important to isolate the Brazilian coup plotters. In his address to the nation at the end of 2022, Mourão complained about people asking the Army to carry out a coup that “would put Brazil in a difficult position before the international community”. Fortunately, we don’t know what would have happened to Brazilian democracy if Trump had been re-elected.

Not by chance, Lula admitted, during his trip to the United States, that the invasion of Ukraine was “a historic mistake”.

Brazil should not become an automatic ally of the United States, but it became clear that there is an ideological conflict over democracy that does not erase traditional geopolitical disputes, but makes them more complex.

The news that Vladimir Putin would be evaluating the peace proposal made by the Brazilian government triggered the usual triggers in our comment. I doubt ChatGPT couldn’t write 90% of what was said if you told him whether you like Lula or not and mentioned the word “Ukraine”.

In effect, what Lula is doing is returning Brazil to its traditional role: a reasonably important, but rarely decisive, voice of a middle power, with some influence in the Global South and in multilateral forums.

No one, least of all Lula, thinks that Putin or Zelensky are going to do something because Brazil tells them to. But Brazil’s entry into the negotiation signals that major powers are looking for a mediator, and Brazil, which has no geopolitical conflicts with anyone, is a good candidate for this task.

It seems new because this has not happened in the last four years, when we were governed by a madman who (a) lied that the president of the largest global power had stolen his election, and (b) lied that the Covid pandemic was a conspiracy of the second largest global power. If we consider the European Union as a single power (which would make it the third global power), it was four years refusing money to take care of the Amazon and cursing Macron’s wife.

As small as Brazil’s ability to influence the conflict between Russia and Ukraine may be, Lula does well to try to exert any influence for peace. Not just out of idealism, but because Brazil, like the rest of the world, is suffering from the economic consequences of the conflict. I guarantee you that if it weren’t for the external shock of the war on prices, the entire interest rate debate would be running more smoothly.

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