Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has dismissed a request from Germany to send ammunition to Ukraine and stressed that his country wants no part in a conflict for which peace should be sought.
«Brazil has no interest in sending ammunition to be used in war,» he said in Brasilia during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on an official visit to the country.
«Brazil is a country of peace and therefore does not want to have any involvement, even indirectly. We should look for who can help find peace between Russia and Ukraine,» insisted the Brazilian president, who has volunteered to negotiate with both Volodimir Zelenski and Vladimir Putin.
Lula, who since the election campaign that brought him back to the Planalto Palace has always defended a peaceful and negotiated solution to solve the conflict, has described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a «mistake», but at the same time has stated that «if one doesn’t want to, two don’t fight».
Lula pointed out that the conflict in Ukraine has shown how distant the United Nations is from the «geopolitical reality», which is why a reform of the organization is needed, with the presence of more representatives «who know how to speak more of a language than the world needs».
«When the UN is strong, possible wars can be avoided with total certainty. Wars today happen for lack of negotiation, for lack of presence of countries that can interfere», said Lula, according to Brazilian media.
On the eve of the arrival of Scholz, who is touring the region, Brazil already announced that it would not send to Ukraine, at Germany’s request, ammunition for battle tanks, including the Leopard 1 tank.
Throughout the conflict, Brazil has sought first with Jair Bolsonaro – despite the fact that he visited Russia in the middle of the war with the argument of reinforcing food security in the country – and then with Lula da Silva to show an image of neutrality, in line with the traditional foreign policy of the Brazilian state.
President Lula has advocated intensifying negotiations and has reproached other international actors such as Europe and the United States for having encouraged confrontation by, for example, supporting Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO and the EU, knowing that this would make things worse.
«In the war there is not only one guilty party,» Lula said in an interview for ‘Time’ magazine when he was a presidential candidate, in which he held Putin and Zelenski equally responsible, reproaching the latter for the «spectacle» he was staging by going from parliament to parliament instead of negotiating.
«If you want peace you have to be patient. They could have sat at a negotiating table for ten, fifteen, twenty days, a whole month, trying to find a solution. I think dialogue only works when you take it seriously,» Lula said at the time.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
