Brazil president to propose Ukraine ‘peace club’ on China visit (Financial Times, 24/3/2023)

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will propose a “peace club” with China to mediate an end to the conflict in Ukraine when he travels to Beijing this week to meet President Xi Jinping.

The leftwing Brazilian leader is seeking to restore Brazil’s diplomatic clout following the relative isolation of the previous Jair Bolsonaro government, but has resisted aligning with western countries sending weapons to Ukraine to repel Russia’s invasion.

“We are very interested in promoting or helping generate some kind of meeting that would lead to a peace process,” Mauro Vieira, Brazil’s foreign minister, told the Financial Times in an interview.

“The president has said so many times he hears a lot about war but very few words about peace. He is interested in peace conversations.”

Lula said earlier this year he would promote the idea of a group of mediating countries, saying “it is time for China to get its hands dirty”. “My suggestion is that we create a group of countries that try to sit at the table with Ukraine and Russia to try to find peace,” he added.

Some analysts were sceptical. Ryan Berg, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “Brazil is an aspirational power. It wants to see itself in the world as contributing to the resolution of problems and meeting global challenges.

“The problem is that Brazil is not in a great position to impact the outcome of this war, nor is it seen by many as a neutral arbiter given  its membership in the Brics, [a group which includes Russia, China, India and South Africa].”

A peace proposal put forward by Mexico late last year gained little traction after Ukraine dismissed it as a “Russian plan”.

Vieira said the trip to China — Brazil’s largest trading partner — demonstrated his country’s return to a more proactive foreign policy. During Bolsonaro’s rightwing administration, Brazil largely avoided multilateral initiatives in favour of close relationships with ideological allies such as the US under then-president Donald Trump.

Lula will travel to China on Saturday and meet Xi in Beijing early next week. He has underlined the country’s history as a non-aligned democracy and its involvement in international bodies such as the Brics group.

His visit comes days after Xi met Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Putin has backed China’s 12-point peace plan, which was criticised by Washington for offering Moscow a way to legitimise its territorial conquests.

Lula is among many Latin American and developing world leaders seeking to stay neutral on the war and expressing unease over western efforts to arm Ukraine. Last month, he refused a request to resell tank ammunition to Germany for use in the war, saying Brazil was a “country of peace”.

On a call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy this month, the 77-year-old Lula promised to visit the country at the “right moment”. But the two leaders conveyed starkly different messages following the meeting.

While Zelenskyy focused on the “importance of upholding the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity of states,” Lula highlighted Brazil’s commitment to “any initiative related to peace-building and dialogue”.

In his office in Brasília, Vieira pledged to restore Brazil’s foreign policy tradition of “keeping contact with every country”, adding: “We want to recover the time that was lost recently. And, of course, there will be no automatic alignments.”

Both China and Russia are important trading partners for Brazil. Bolsonaro visited Moscow shortly before it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February to secure fertiliser supplies for Brazil’s booming agribusiness sector. Brazil’s trade with China is dominated by commodities, notably the export of soyabeans and iron ore to the Asian country.

Lula’s attempt to become involved in Ukraine is not his first foray into thorny international affairs. As president in 2010, he flew to Iran and, with Turkey’s prime minister, secured an agreement on the country’s nuclear programme. But the pact, criticised by the US and other western governments, was quickly broken by Tehran.

Additional reporting by Carolina Ingizza