Lula a hopeless failure in the morality of Ukraine

• Brazil's president is effectively siding with Vladimir Putin and spreading his war propaganda

With democrats like Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who needs autocrats? Shame on Lula for pretending that Kyiv, Nato and the EU 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 doing nothing to help Ukraine.

Lula was sworn into his old job — he was president between 2003 and 2010 — only one month ago. That followed the four-year stint of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, “the Trump of the Tropics”.

A week after Lula took over, pro-Bolsonaro mobs ransacked federal buildings in Brasilia, in a farcical reprise of the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 2021. When Brazil’s institutions — and Lula — withstood that assault, much of the democratic world exhaled in relief.

One person who was particularly glad was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He’s long been among those “Western” leaders who’ve tried hardest to transcend perceptions of “the West and the rest” by instead framing world politics as a contest between democratic and autocratic destinies.

“We’re all delighted that Brazil is back on the global stage,” Scholz beamed at Lula during his visit to Brasilia this week. “You guys have been sorely missed.”

Lula spontaneously gave the chancellor a hug.

In particular, Scholz wants to broaden the alliance to support Ukraine and oppose Putin by including as many countries as possible in the “Global South”.

In 2022, when he hosted the Group of Seven, a club of liberal democracies with large economies, he also invited India, Indonesia, SA and Senegal.

The same objective took him to South America this week. Once again, Scholz was reminded that the farther countries are from Europe, the less urgency they feel about the war in Ukraine. Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, was still relatively forthcoming. “We will always defend multilateralism, the peaceful solution 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 assistance and only vaguely wishing for “peace”.

But it was Lula who not only rebuffed Scholz’s entreaties wholesale but also lost the plot entirely. “Brazil has no interest in passing on ammunition so that it will be used in the war,” Lula said at their joint media conference. “Brazil does not want to have any participation, even indirect.”

For a glimpse into Lula’s reasoning, it helps to read his comments in a 2022 interview with Time Magazine.

“It’s not just Putin who is guilty,” Lula insisted. “The US and the EU are also guilty” — apparently for not being more categorical in ruling out Ukraine’s membership in Nato (which hasn’t even been up for discussion since 2008).

But Lula had more to say. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may strike most people as an inspirational leader defying a brutal invasion. Not Lula. The Brazilian president believes Zelensky is “weird” and behaves like a publicity hound flitting from one TV camera to the next, when he should instead be “negotiating” — presumably about Ukraine’s capitulation. “This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war,” he said.

Come again? It’s one thing for leaders to decide, on the basis of realpolitik, that they should stay out of a conflict they consider — correctly or erroneously — irrelevant to their national interests. It’s also fair for nations in the Global South to point to the long history of Western hypocrisy in picking which tragedies and under which circumstances to be idealistic about, and which to ignore or even condone.

But to adopt and rebroadcast Putin’s own propaganda narratives is beyond the pale. It was Putin alone who decided to attack Ukraine and who has kept changing his reasons for doing so ever since.

Apparently, he’s now fighting Satanism in Ukraine. He is an old-fashioned imperialist and dictator, bent on subjugating and colonising a smaller neighbour and breaching all international norms in the process.

One day, the tragic war in Ukraine will indeed end in negotiations. But it’s not for Lula, or anybody 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 mind around the moral geometry in Ukraine, Europe and the world, he doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.