When he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing this week, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will discuss his ideas for a global “peace club” aimed at settling the situation in Ukraine, according to a statement his foreign ministry made on Friday. According to Lula, who has maintained his neutral stance on the crisis, the non-aligned countries, like Brazil, have the best opportunity of brokering a peace agreement.
Brazil’s foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, told the newspaper that his country was “quite interested in encouraging or assisting in the establishment of any type of summit that might lead to a peace process.” ” The president has stated several times that he hears a lot of talk about war but very few about peace.He enjoys having discussions about peace.
Since beating the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro in the elections last October, Lula, as he is more commonly known, has essentially maintained his predecessor’s neutral stance on Ukraine. Lula has, however, played a more active role globally than Bolsonaro, declaring in January that he plans to convene a G20-style group “to put a stop to the Russia-Ukraine war.”
At the time, he remarked, “It is vital to put together a group with enough clout to be considered at a negotiation table and sit down with both sides.
Lula criticised US and EU officials for offering NATO membership to Ukraine during his election campaign, calling Zelensky “as guilty for the conflict as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin.”
The Brazilian president has spoken on the phone with Zelensky and Putin as well as had meetings with US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz since entering office. After meeting with Biden last month, Lula emphasised the importance of finding “a way out to stop this war.”China reiterated Lula’s demands for peace, releasing its 12-point “Position on the Political Solution of the Ukrainian Crisis” two weeks later.
Putin supported the Chinese offer, but the Americans rejected it. Although in Ukraine, Zelensky stated last month that he only agreed with a few elements in the text, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday called Beijing’s plan a “tactical manoeuvre” to postpone the confrontation in favour of Russia.
Any proposal made by Lula and his hypothetical “peace club” may be met with the same reaction as Mexico’s own peace initiative at the UN last year. Mikhail Podoliak, a government consultant for Ukraine, labelled the Mexican proposal a “Russian plan,” and two months later, Kiev unveiled its own ten-point peace proposal.
Kiev’s proposal, nevertheless, was rejected as unrealistic by Moscow since it called for Russia to hand over the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine and extradite its leaders for war crimes.
