Brazil Is Ukraine’s Best Bet for Peace

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the resurgence of nonalignment across the global south has baffled Western officials. The United States and its allies seem confused that many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America refuse to join the sanctions campaign against Russia or ship weapons to Ukraine. Many Latin American countries’ neutrality—and their unwillingness to become de facto belligerents in a European war—is described as shameful, if not a moral failure. Some even go so far as to say that the region’s overwhelmingly nonaligned stance puts the rules-based international order at risk.

Brazil—Latin America’s largest country and diplomatic heavyweight—has come under particular scrutiny for its position on Ukraine. While the United States has pledged to support the war in Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has vocally pressed for a truce and peaceful solution to the conflict; some frank statements by Lula have generated pushback in Washington. But Brazil remains the country best positioned to act as an honest broker to end the war in Ukraine—precisely because it has refused to take sides.

Lula got to work on his peace proposal quickly after his inauguration in January. During a February visit to Washington, Lula suggested to U.S. President Joe Biden that Brazil create a so-called “peace club”—a group of countries that would facilitate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine and that might include rising powers such as China, India, Indonesia, and Turkey.

In March, a 30-minute video call between Lula and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky showed that Brazil means business. Lula used the opportunity to convey to Zelensky the urgency of a negotiated solution to the war. Then, later that month, Lula’s chief advisor Celso Amorim traveled to Moscow, where—breaking all protocol—he was received by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. On his return trip to Brazil, Amorim met with a top foreign affairs advisor to French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron has also appeared interested in negotiating an end to the conflict.

The result of Amorim’s Putin meeting was uncertain at best, with Amorim acknowledging that neither side is ready to sit down for talks. Still, Amorim’s personal audience with Putin—and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s recent trip to Brazil—indicate how seriously Moscow is taking proposals from the government in Brasília.

Lula’s April visit to China allowed Brazil to continue to pursue its mediation effort. The two countries released a joint statement agreeing that negotiation is “the only viable way out of the crisis in Ukraine.“ Though the 12-point Chinese peace proposal released in February suggested a total ceasefire without the withdrawal of any Russian troops from Ukraine—a prospect the United States and its allies vehemently oppose—Chinese President Xi Jinping’s hour-long phone call with Zelensky last week would seem to indicate a potential breakthrough.

Read More

Why Lula’s Visit to Beijing Matters More Than Macron’s

The world’s economic dynamism is shifting to the global south.

Analysis

|

Howard W. French

Can Brazil Negotiate an End to the War in Ukraine?

Lula’s envoy sits down with Putin in Moscow.

Latin America Brief

|

Catherine Osborn

Lula’s Out to Get Brazil’s Global Mojo Back

Like Biden, Brazil’s old-new president inherited a mess on the international stage.

Report

|

Rocio Fabbro

Far from reflecting ambiguity or indecisiveness, as it is sometimes portrayed, Brazil’s foreign policy embodies what we call active nonalignment. As Latin America is buffeted by pressures from the great powers to take sides in what is becoming a new cold war between the United States and China, active nonalignment dictates that the region should focus on its own interests and not on those of others.

Active nonalignment takes a page from the Non-Aligned Movement that bloomed in the 1960s and ’70s, but it is not its equivalent. Founded in 1961 and led by leaders such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the Non-Aligned Movement provided a platform for postcolonial states grappling with development challenges and fragile sovereignty in a bipolar world. Today’s active nonalignment is a foreign-policy doctrine, not a movement. It comes during what the World Bank has referred to as a “wealth shift” from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific and as rising powers from the global south—such as Brazil—are starting to flex their muscles.

Active nonalignment is not about neutrality or equidistance between great powers. Rather, it is dynamic. This means that on some issues (such as democracy or human rights), Latin American countries may take positions closer to the United States’, while on others (such as international trade) they may take positions closer to China’s. What countries will not do is side unequivocally with one or the other. This, of course, requires a highly calibrated diplomacy that evaluates each issue on its own merits and then decides how to respond. It is a much more exacting task than doing as one is told on every issue, as aligned countries are expected to do. But this position also lends developing nations greater leverage in their dealings with great powers. Brazil’s behavior is proactive—always on the lookout for new opportunities on the international stage rather than passively accepting its realities.

Active nonalignment also stresses the need for regional cooperation and multilateralism. Brazil has excelled at this in the past, both in Latin America and beyond. In the region, it helped found the Rio Group in the 1980s and the Union of South American Nations in 2008. Within the global south, Brazil has been instrumental in the India-Brazil-South Africa forum launched in 2003, the BRICS grouping, and the G-20 of agriculture-exporting nations. The same can be said for entities such as the Africa-Latin America dialogue and the Arab-Latin America dialogue that Lula created during his first two terms in office.

One lesson Western commentators drew from the ordeal was that Brazil had gotten in over its head, was not ready for prime time, and should not get involved in ambitious out-of-area undertakings. But one could easily reach the opposite conclusion. Given the state of Iran’s nuclear program today, the United States in 2010 arguably wasted a good opportunity to close a deal that was not perfect but good enough. Instead, Washington sabotaged Brazil’s efforts—and now seems to be paying the price. There is something to be said for having previously uninvolved parties act as honest brokers on serious international issues.

The lessons from Brazil’s Iran initiative should be applied to today’s war in Ukraine. If there is a country in the global south that is ideally positioned to act as a broker among north, south, east, and west, it is Brazil, whose strong diplomatic traditions and coalition-building capabilities put it in an unrivaled position to press ahead with bringing peace to Ukraine. As FP’s Howard French wrote last week, Brazil is “a large, multiracial society with a diverse economy and an abundance of soft power—yet without a history of extraterritorial conquest and no known ambitions for dominance over others.” These credentials are only bolstered by having an experienced and respected leader such as Lula in office. A key next step should be to bring India (whose minister of external affairs, S. Jaishankar, has played a key role in keeping the G-20 in line this year) into the peace club.

On April 6, Lula made a statement proposing that Ukraine abandon its claim to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, while Russia would withdraw from the territories it invaded in 2022. (This means Russia could stay in the Donbas and other areas it previously held in eastern Ukraine.) The following day, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded on Twitter: “There is no legal, political or moral reason why Ukraine should give up even a centimeter of its land. Any mediation efforts to restore peace must be based on respect for the sovereignty and full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.”

In the end, whether negotiations happen will come down to whether the West has an interest in bringing an end to this tragic war or whether it prefers to fight it as long as is necessary to weaken Russia permanently, as U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in April 2022. Until now, Ukraine’s preference has been to not give up any territory. Yet that could prove a costly wager for the country’s people—and its economy. Although precise estimates vary, leaked U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents—the authenticity of which Russia and Ukraine questioned—estimated that Ukraine has so far suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties from the war. (189,500 to 223,000 Russians are estimated to have been killed or wounded.)

While both Russia and Ukraine have suffered staggering casualties, Ukraine has suffered far more economic harm. In 2022, Ukraine’s GDP fell by 29.1 percent; Russia’s only dropped by 2.1 percent. Russia has three times the population of Ukraine, yet, in 2021, its economy was 15 times larger. International Monetary Fund projections for 2023 indicate that Russia’s economy will perform better than Germany’s, with the former’s GDP growing 0.3 percent. In other words: Western sanctions are barely making a dent. One reason for that, of course, is that Russian trade with the global south is thriving.

A stalemated war—which is where Ukraine may be headed—is ultimately about economic resilience. There, Russia has the upper hand. The Brazilian mediation initiative to bring the conflict to an end soon may be an opportunity to save Ukraine—rather than the naive, misguided undertaking many in the West describe it to be.