How to Understand Brazil’s Ukraine Policy

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s honeymoon with the West ended remarkably quickly. After Brazil weathered four turbulent years under right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s narrow electoral victory last October and inauguration in January were met with relief in most capitals around the world. And when it comes to strengthening multilateralism and fighting deforestation, Brazil did quickly go back to normal: An early string of diplomatic meetings between Lula and his counterparts in Argentina, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States sealed Brazil’s return to the global stage, while several governments announced financial contributions to the reactivated Amazon Fund, which had been suspended under Bolsonaro.

But Lula’s position on Russia’s war in Ukraine has frustrated policymakers across the West and may limit Brazil’s foreign-policy bandwidth on other issues. While Lula’s eagerness to lead negotiations to end the conflict may be well-intentioned, his frequent controversial public statements on the subject are risky—and could generate permanent friction between Brazil and its Western partners precisely as Brasília seeks to earn a seat at the table of powerful nations.

Lula argued in early April that Ukraine should consider ceding the Crimean Peninsula to negotiate peace with Russia, saying that “Zelensky cannot want it all.” His contention that the United States has prolonged the war, made during a trip to China, echoes the Russian government’s narrative. Lula also claimed that Kyiv and Moscow were equally responsible for the conflict.

But during a subsequent trip to Europe, Lula seemed to temporarily back down from this statement—and recognized that Ukraine was the war’s “great victim.” Brazilian diplomats were also quick to remind their European counterparts that Brazil had been the only member of the BRICS grouping (which also includes Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to support a Feb. 23 United Nations Assembly resolution calling on Russia to pull its troops out of Ukraine.

Western countries have been highly critical of Lula’s rhetoric. The Biden administration condemned the Brazilian president’s claim that Washington needed to “stop encouraging war,” saying that Lula was “parroting” Russian and Chinese propaganda. The Ukrainian government responded that Brazil’s claims were “not in line with the real state of affairs” and urged Lula to visit and “understand the real causes” of the war, adding, “Ukraine does not trade its territories.”

Despite being welcomed by several observers, Lula’s ambition to play a mediating role in Ukraine is unlikely to prosper without the West’s blessing—and Ukraine’s recognition of Brazil as an impartial actor. Yet Western leaders would still do well to understand the roots of Brasília’s thinking. After all, the global south’s reluctance to align with the West on Ukraine is indicative of broader dynamics in north-south relations and may well dictate the future of the global order.

While Lula’s comments on Russia and Ukraine have raised eyebrows in the West, they are largely in line not only with positions taken when Lula was first president—he is a founding member of BRICS—but with all previous Brazilian governments, irrespective of ideology. Moscow has long been a low-intensity all-weather friend to Brasília, offering a relationship free of the complexities and criticisms that have shaped Brazil’s ties to the West. Imports of Russian fertilizer are also crucial to Brazil’s hugely important agribusiness. In 2014, the government of Dilma Rousseff, a Lula ally, refused to bow to Western pressure to disinvite Russian President Vladimir Putin to a BRICS summit in Brazil after he invaded the Crimean Peninsula. Rousseff later supported a joint BRICS statement rejecting Western attempts to isolate Russia diplomatically.

It’s not just leftists like Lula and Rousseff: Brazilian center-right and far-right presidents have also used the Brazil-Russia relationship to their benefit. Rousseff’s successor, Michel Temer—who came to power after Rousseff’s controversial impeachment and did not visit the White House once during his presidency—was guaranteed a warm welcome and statesman-like treatment at the annual BRICS summits. Even Bolsonaro, who initially sought alignment with former U.S. President Donald Trump until his electoral defeat in 2020 but eventually fell out with nearly all Western powers, depended on the BRICS as a diplomatic life raft: In no other international setting could Bolsonaro be hosted without having to defend himself against criticism of his environmental policies or handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—when analysts agreed such a move looked imminent—the isolated Bolsonaro traveled to Moscow and expressed solidarity with Russia. While Bolsonaro justified his trip by saying he wanted to ensure Russia’s continued supply of fertilizer to Brazil, the main reason was most likely far more mundane: With his reelection bid approaching and Lula hobnobbing with European heads of state, Bolsonaro needed to show that he still had friends abroad. (Only Hungary’s Viktor Orbán joined in hosting Bolsonaro for a photo-op.) When numerous commentators in the Brazilian media criticized Bolsonaro’s Moscow trip, he was publicly defended by none other than Celso Amorim, Lula’s former foreign minister and current diplomatic advisor. Amorim is also a longtime friend of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s; during a recent visit to Brasília, Lavrov was visibly at ease—disembarking his airplane in sneakers.

Brazil’s Ukraine stance today would thus hardly be different had Bolsonaro won last October’s closely fought presidential election (though Bolsonaro would probably have been less interested in mediating in the conflict). Indeed, a nonaligned stance amid a possible new Cold War may be the only thing Lula and Bolsonaro can agree on. On the one hand, Brazil sees preserving ties to powers like Russia, India, China, and the European Union as the best way to balance its highly asymmetric relationship to the United States, which long regarded Latin America as a subordinate region within its sphere of influence. On the other, keeping all doors open is Brazil’s attempt to hedge its bets in a world where the outcome of renewed great-power politics is very much uncertain.

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Second, Brazilians often perceive Western rhetoric about the moral imperative to condemn Russia as grating and hypocritical. This is because numerous Western violations of international law—such as the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and NATO’s decision to transform a mission to protect the people of Benghazi into a quest for regime change in Libya in 2011, among many others—were permitted and even justified by those same powers now seeking to isolate Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

Seen from Brazil, the liberal rules-based order has often been neither liberal nor rules-based. There is a belief that despite some welcoming rhetoric (political theorist John Ikenberry called the liberal order “easy to join and hard to overturn”), the West was never really willing to welcome the likes of Moscow, Brasília, and New Delhi as full members of its club. Brazil and India have long sought permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, a bid that remains unanswered. Similarly, an archaic gentlemen’s agreement still ensures that the West appoints the heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This perception helps explain Brazil’s eagerness to strengthen parallel structures such as the BRICS-established New Development Bank, end the dollar’s trade dominance, and engage with countries like China on Ukraine.

Third, Brazil’s government—and most of Brazil’s opposition—believes that the best way to hedge its bets and preserve strategic autonomy is to actively participate in the creation of a multipolar global order. In this less Western-centric system, Russia—in Brazil’s view—would be a pole. (So would the United States.) While multipolarity is often seen as less stable and more difficult to manage than bipolarity or unipolarity, Brasília’s view has traditionally been more optimistic: Former Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota coined the terms “benign multipolarity” and “cooperative multipolarity,” which regard the emergence of multipolarity not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

Finally, Lula’s eagerness to contribute to negotiations on Ukraine reflects an often overlooked or belittled belief in Brazil that the country has a unique contribution to make on the global stage. This urge has been largely dormant during the past decade due to domestic political turmoil; Lula’s “Brazil is back” narrative does not aspire a return to 2018—the year Bolsonaro was elected—but Brazilian diplomacy in 2012, just before a cascade of political turmoil, economic crisis, and political polarization put an end to nearly two decades of relative domestic stability and foreign-policy activism.

At the time, Brazil had firmly established itself as a diplomatic powerhouse. The country led a complex peacekeeping mission in Haiti starting in 2004; sought to negotiate, with Turkey, a deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear program in 2010; took a leading role in the global debate about humanitarian intervention; hosted the global summit to discuss the future of internet governance; and opened so many embassies that it entered the ranks of the 10 largest networks of diplomatic representations worldwide.

Even in times of political instability—such as during the Temer administration—Brazil did not put its geopolitical ambitions aside. Perhaps only in India is the quest for reform of the international system, particularly at the United Nations, so intimately tied to the nation’s foreign-policy identity. But contrary to India or other nuclear-armed nations such as China, the United States, and Russia—which naturally consider themselves great powers—there is a recognition among part of Brazil’s foreign-policy elite that the country still needs to earn its place on the world stage, and that there is limited upward mobility in today’s global order.

Yet particularly when compared to other emerging markets such as India, Brazil faces a tremendous disadvantage: Its share of global GDP is steadily declining. While Brazil represented a little over 4 percent of the global economy in the 1980s, it is merely 2.3 percent today—and little suggests the country is anywhere close to achieving growth rates seen in other emerging markets. That makes diplomatic stature all the more critical as a point of leverage.

Just as Brazil’s ambitious Iran initiative failed because it lacked Western buy-in—and ultimately complicated Brasília’s ties to Washington—Lula’s desire to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine could have the same fate. Brazil has a key role to play in a number of other global and regional challenges, from democratic backsliding and rising transnational crime across Latin America to the global fight against climate change and deforestation, and Lula’s energy may be better spent there.

While it is tempting to dismiss Lula’s quest for peace in Ukraine as quixotic, Brazil’s assertiveness reveals broader misgivings across the global south about the inclusiveness of the supposedly liberal international order. To get Lula on board with Western efforts in Ukraine, Western powers should first need to prove that they value Brazil as a partner. Until it is heard and taken seriously, the global south may continue to dissent.