Lula Can’t Tell Vladimir from Volodymyr - Andreas Kluth (WP)

 Washington Post - 2.2.2023

Lula Can’t Tell Vladimir from Volodymyr

Andreas Kluth

 

With democrats like Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who needs autocrats? Shame on Lula for pretending that Kyiv, NATO and the European Union are as much to blame for Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine as the wannabe tsar in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin. Shame on Lula for not doing anything to help Ukraine.

Lula was sworn in to his old post just a month ago – he was president from 2003 to 2010. This was followed by the four-year term of office of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro – “the trump card of the tropics”. A week after Lula took over, pro-Bolsonaro mobs even looted federal buildings in Brasilia, in a farcical re-enactment of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. When Brazil’s institutions – and Lula – withstood that attack, much of the democratic world breathed a sigh of relief.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz was particularly pleased. He has long been among the “Western” leaders who have struggled hardest to transcend perceptions of “the West and the rest,” instead portraying world politics as a struggle between democratic and autocratic destinies.

“We are all happy that Brazil is back on the world stage,” Scholz beamed at Lula during his visit to Brasilia this week. “You were sorely missed.” Lula spontaneously hugged the Chancellor.

In particular, Scholz wants to expand the alliance in support of Ukraine and against Putin by including as many countries as possible from the “Global South”. For example, last year when he hosted the Group of Seven, a club of liberal democracies with large economies, he also invited India, Indonesia, South Africa and Senegal.

The same goal took him to South America this week. Once again, Scholz was reminded that the further away the countries are from Europe, the less urgent the war in Ukraine is. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric was relatively accommodating. “We will always defend multilateralism, the peaceful resolution of conflicts and, above all, the application of human rights,” he said after meeting Scholz in Santiago. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez was more reticent, refusing to offer military aid to Ukraine and only vaguely wishing for “peace”.

But it was Lula who not only rejected Scholz’s requests in general, but also completely lost the thread. “Brazil has no interest in passing on munitions to be used in war,” Lula said at their joint press conference. “Brazil doesn’t want any involvement, not even indirect.”

To get some insight into Lula’s reasoning, it helps to read his comments in an interview with Time magazine last year. “Putin isn’t the only one to blame,” Lula insisted. “The US and the EU are also guilty” – apparently because they have not categorically ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine (which hasn’t even been discussed since 2008).

But Lula had more to say. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may seem to most people as an inspirational leader braving a brutal invasion. Not Lula. The Brazilian president thinks Zelenskyy is “weird” and is acting like a publicity dog scurrying from one TV camera to the next when he is supposed to be “negotiating” – presumably about Ukraine’s surrender. “This guy is just as responsible for the war as Putin is,” he said.

Come back? It is one thing for politicians to decide, on the basis of realpolitik, that they should stay out of a conflict they consider, rightly or wrongly, irrelevant to their national interests. It is also fair for the nations of the Global South to point out the long history of Western hypocrisy about idealizing and ignoring or even condoning tragedies, where in the world and under what circumstances.

But adopting and spreading Putin’s own propaganda narratives is going too far. It was Putin alone who decided to attack Ukraine and who has since changed his reasons for doing so – apparently he is now fighting Satanism in Ukraine. He is an old-fashioned imperialist and dictator bent on subjugating and colonizing a smaller neighbor while breaking all international norms.

One day the tragic war in Ukraine will indeed end in negotiations. But it is not for Lula, or anyone else, to tell a country struggling to survive that it is time to sit down with the invaders. If Lula can’t grapple with moral geometry in Ukraine, Europe and the world, he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

 

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for the Bloomberg Opinion and reports on European politics. The former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and author of The Economist is the author of “Hannibal and Me”.