Bolsonaro goes to Russia on the riskiest trip of his presidency

President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) begins this Tuesday (15th) the most controversial and risky trip of his term so far, with a short passage through the center of Europe’s biggest security crisis in decades, to Vladimir Putin’s Moscow.

Amid what the Kremlin calls Western hysteria, the US says a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent and could happen this week. Bolsonaro himself and other officials have tried to diminish the obvious perception of the impropriety of the timing of the visit, proposed by Putin at the end of the year.

Of course, there would be no way for the Russian or the Brazilian to know that this would be such a decisive week in recent European history, but the sequence of messages from the US against the trip suggest the bill to be collected.

The Brazilian’s presence in the midst of the crisis, without a married visit to Kiev, tends to be read as tacit support for Russian demands to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and to resolve the issue of pro-Kremlin separatist areas in the east of the country. . After the meeting with Putin, Bolsonaro visits the Duma (Lower House of Parliament) and a forum for Brazilian and Russian businessmen.

Bolsonaro will arrive in Moscow around 4 pm, and should go straight to the hotel. He and the entourage will enter the Kremlin’s anti-Covid bubble.

Putin is notoriously paranoid about the disease, and he credited the fact that Emmanuel Macron didn’t take a Russian RT-PCR test with putting the French president at the giant table that became a meme last week.

Everyone in the entourage will be tested three to five times during their stay – including Bolsonaro. Journalists with access to the Kremlin’s interior must produce three negative results in the days leading up to Putin’s meeting with Bolsonaro, on Wednesday (16).

The event will take place after the Brazilian deposits a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in Jardim de Alexandre, next to the Kremlin. In 2017, in the most recent visit of its kind, Michel Temer won a “Fora Temer” shouted from a distance by tourists.

This is unlikely to happen now: Moscow is depleted of tourists, with worrying numbers of contamination by the omicron variant.

Afterwards, Bolsonaro and Putin meet and participate in a larger lunch with the entourage. Among ministers, will be Chancellor Carlos França, Walter Braga Netto (Defense) and Luiz Eduardo Ramos (Government Secretary).

There was also a prophylactic downsizing of the entourage of Mário Frias (Culture) and team, who would travel without exactly a known agenda, but withdrew after the cost of an equally unclear trip by the secretary to the US was revealed.

There will also be side events, such as the meeting of Braga Netto and França with their counterparts. Here the topic of Ukraine, diplomats involved in the conversation believe, should be explored more than in the Putin-Bolsonaro conversation.

In any case, the speech is unique: Brazil follows the United Nations resolutions, and the one that talks about the situation in eastern Ukraine calls for a negotiated solution.

Were it not for the security crisis, the predominant topic on the agenda would be fertilizers. Russia is a world leader in the field, and the pandemic has disrupted production chains, increasing international prices.

Of the BRL 5.7 billion that Brazil imported from Russia in 2021, 60% corresponded to phosphate and nitrogen inputs. In previous conversations, initiated in a visit by França and Tereza Cristina (Agriculture) at the end of the year, the idea was to establish a more permanent contract to guarantee the flow to the country.

The Russians must also sign the intention to purchase a Petrobras fertilizer factory, to formalize the partnership. Tereza, an eventual candidate for vice on Bolsonaro’s ticket as well as Braga Netto, did not travel because she contracted Covid-19.

In the opposite direction, Brazil exported soy and other basic products, totaling US$ 1.6 billion last year.

Another field that, due to the circumstances, gains importance is that of defense. There will be a meeting with members of the three Forces and the Ministry of Defense separately, but in the end it is the sequence of a long process.

It began in 1994, when Brasilia bought Igla portable anti-aircraft missiles from Russia. In 2002, a high-level committee for defense matters was formed in the wake of Moscow’s attempt to sell Sukhoi-35 fighter jets to Brazil.

Cooperation is limited – the Russians have offered Brazil the Pantsir-S1 anti-aircraft system on three occasions since 2012, but the purchase was rejected. As told to leaf the Air Force commander, Brigadier Carlos Almeida Baptista, it would not make sense to acquire the product without first having a defined doctrine.

Concretely so far, there was the purchase of a squadron with 12 Mi-35M attack helicopters in 2012 – there are rumors that the FAB will discontinue it this year.

This shows, however, that there are nuances about Bolsonaro’s trip, even though he defended it with the argument that the Russian is a “conservative” like he and Viktor Orbán, the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, who will visit on the 17th, following of turning.

There are even some curiosities. When Dilma Rousseff (PT) was impeached in 2016, the Russian state press spoke of a “coup”.

Not so much because of affinity, although there was clearly a good relationship with the PT, but more because the ideological resonance of any overthrow of a leader is frowned upon in official Russian circles.

Bolsonaro, in turn, was praised by Putin for his “masculine qualities” when he faced infection with the new coronavirus, suggesting misinformation by the paranoid Russian with the disease in the face of his colleague’s health irresponsibility.

Be that as it may, Brazil today is a pariah in several forums, and the photo of Bolsonaro with Putin will certainly not help him, but it is not something new for a Brazilian president.

Since the end of the Cold War, Itamaraty has always looked for a way to expand its role in the world in relations with alternative poles to the US.

In the years of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT, 2003-2010) in the Presidency, there was a more radical shift towards the so-called South-South diplomacy, which could be embodied in the Brics bloc, which precisely united Brazil, Russia and India, in 2006. –South Africa arrived at the club later. Today the bloc is innocuous, pale in the face of the strong alliance between Moscow and Beijing in opposition to the West.

Be that as it may, the relationship with Russia has always been prominent. President who made the most international trips, 139, Lula dedicated 4 of them to Putin’s country. Dilma (2011-16), 4 others, and Temer (MDB, 2016-18), 1.