Lula Cant Tell Vladimir from Volodymyr

Lula was sworn into his old job and was already president between 2003 and 2010 just a month ago. This followed the four-year term of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump of the Tropics. A week after Lula took office, pro-Bolsonaro mobs even ransacked federal buildings in Brasilia, in a farcical repeat of the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. When Brazilian institutions and Lula resisted this attack, much of the democratic world breathed a sigh of relief.

One person who was particularly pleased was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He has long been among those Western leaders who have tried hard to transcend perceptions of the West and the rest, instead framing world politics as a struggle between democratic and authoritarian destinies.

Everyone was happy to see Brazil back on the world stage, Solz ran into Lula during his visit to Brasilia this week. You have been greatly missed. Lula spontaneously hugged the chancellor.

Specifically, Scholz wants to expand the alliance to support Ukraine and oppose Putin by including as many countries in the Global South as possible. Last year, for example, when it hosted the Group of Seven, a club of liberal democracies with major economies, it also invited India, Indonesia, South Africa and Senegal.

The same goal took him to South America this week. Once again, Scholz reminded that the further countries are from Europe, the less urgency they feel about the war in Ukraine. Chile’s president, Gabriel Borich, was still relatively impatient. We will always defend multilateralism, the peaceful resolution of conflicts and, above all, the validity of human rights, he said after meeting Scholz in Santiago. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez was more guarded, refusing to offer Ukraine any military aid and only vaguely desiring peace.

But it was Lula who not only rejected Scholzs pleas outright, but lost the plot entirely. Brazil is not interested in transferring ammunition to be used in war, Lula said at their joint press conference. Brazil does not want to have any involvement, even indirectly.

For a glimpse into Lula’s reasoning, it helps to read his comments in a Time magazine interview last year. Putin is not the only one to blame, Lula insisted. The US and EU are also guilty apparently for not being more assertive in blocking Ukraine’s NATO membership (which hasn’t even been discussed since 2008).

But Lula had more to say. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy might describe most people as an inspirational leader, defying a brutal invasion. Not Lula. The president of Brazil thinks that Zelensky is strange and behaves like a hound dog going from one TV camera to another, when instead he should probably be negotiating for the capitulation of Ukraine. This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war, he said.

What did you say? It is one thing for leaders to decide, on the basis of Realpolitik, that they should stay out of a conflict that they rightly or wrongly consider irrelevant to their national interests. It is also fair for nations in the Global South to point to the West’s long history of hypocrisy in picking and choosing which tragedies, where in the world and under what circumstances, to be idealistic about and which to ignore or even condone.

But adopting and rebroadcasting Putin’s own propaganda narratives is beyond the pale. It was only Putin who decided to attack Ukraine, and who keeps changing his reasons for doing so since then, apparently, now he is fighting Satanism in Ukraine. He is an old-fashioned imperialist and dictator, who wants to subjugate and colonize a smaller neighbor and violate all international norms in the process.

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 fighting for its very survival that the time has come to take a seat at the table with the invaders. If Lula can’t wrap his head around the moral geometry in Ukraine, Europe and the world, he’s not worth taking seriously.

More from Bloomberg Opinion:

Frederick the Greats Ukraine Negotiation Tips: Andreas Kluth

Ukraine desperately needs tanks. Now It Needs Planes: James Stavridis

South America: Money is either dangerous or irrelevant: Eduardo Porter

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. A former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, he is the author of Hannibal and Me.

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