Sympathetic statements to Vladimir Putin by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and pressure from agribusiness have been decisive for the Foreign Ministry to include in its official manifestations at the UN about the conflict in Ukraine, nods to Russia, they told sheet interlocutors in the government.
In recent days, the Bolsonaro government has endorsed resolutions in the United Nations system that condemn the invasion of Ukrainian territory by Russian forces. But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has placed in statements signs that contemplate arguments defended by Putin’s government, in a move that worries American diplomats and allies.
Interlocutors say that Itamaraty’s positions have been defined at the highest level and passed through the scrutiny of the Planalto. In some cases, the Minister of Defense, Braga Netto, is also called upon to give an opinion.
The fear of governments opposed to Putin is that the pro-Moscow references are a harbinger of a change in the votes of Brazil, currently a member of the UN Security Council. Interlocutors in the Bolsonaro government, however, said that so far, a change in route is not on the radar.
Foreign negotiators, when mentioning this concern to Brazilian authorities, receive as a response that the country is against the violation of Ukrainian borders – but that this does not oblige it to fully endorse the line of action of the Western powers and that the Itamaraty’s stance has been consistent .
Currently, the council members are negotiating a resolution on humanitarian law in war, and the Brazilian foreign ministry is working to sign language that is not condemnatory of the Kremlin and that urges the parties to guarantee the protection of civilians. After a speech just over a week ago with harsh terms against Moscow, the Brazilian demonstrations at the UN have followed the line of avoiding expressions considered excessively aggressive against the Russians and, mainly, against Putin.
On February 25, the day after the start of the war, Brazil’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ronaldo Costa Filho, said that “a limit has been crossed”. “The security concerns expressed in recent years by the Russian Federation, particularly with regard to the strategic balance in Europe, do not give the country the right to threaten the territorial integrity and sovereignty of another state,” said the Brazilian diplomat at the time. , in a harsh tone that would not be repeated in the future.
In that session, Brazil supported a resolution that strongly criticized the military aggression promoted by the Kremlin. The text was barred by the Russian mission at the UN, as the country, which holds a permanent seat on the Security Council, has veto power. A few days later, Brazil’s delegation in New York voted in favor of a bill that called for an emergency debate on the Ukrainian crisis at the UN General Assembly — in yet another gesture that went against Russian interests.
But in his speech, Costa Filho criticized the pillars of the West’s strategy to respond to the attack: the supply of weapons to Ukraine and the application of economic sanctions. “The supply of weapons, the use of cyber attacks and the application of selective sanctions, which can affect sectors such as fertilizers and wheat, with great risk of famine, imply the risk of aggravating and prolonging the conflict”.
Thus, the Brazilian ambassador contemplated in his speech themes that have become a constant in the positions adopted by the Brazilian government, which has Minister Tereza Cristina at the head of the Ministry of Agriculture: the fear that the sanctions taken against Moscow will harm supplies to Brazil fertilizers, essential for agribusiness. In 2021, Russia, the main exporter of the product to the country, accounted for 22% of the total of these inputs purchased by the Brazilian market.
On Friday (4), the Russian government recommended the country’s fertilizer producers to suspend their exports. The move puts even more pressure on Bolsonaro, who traveled to Moscow in mid-February to, he said, ensure the flow of fertilizer imports to Brazil.
In addition to the influence of agribusiness, Bolsonaro’s defenses of the Russian leader have played a decisive role in the inclusion of language less hostile to the Kremlin. On February 27, Bolsonaro disagreed with the use of the word “massacre” by a journalist during an interview to define the Russian action and mocked the fact that Volodymyr Zelensky had worked as a comedian before becoming Ukraine’s president.
“You are exaggerating the word ‘massacre’. There is no interest on the part of a head of state to carry out a massacre anywhere,” Bolsonaro said at the time. On Thursday (3), in another pat on the back of the Russian leader, he said that Putin defended Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon in the past. “In other words, we have partners today who help us with these issues,” he concluded.
In his February 28 speech at the UN General Assembly, in which he once again criticized the application of sanctions, Ambassador Costa Filho made one of the clearest nods to Moscow in his pronouncements — although the Brazilian mission once again voted for the resolution condemnation of Russian military action.
“The weakening of the Minsk accords by all parties and the discrediting of security concerns voiced by Russia set the stage for the crisis we are seeing,” he said.
Objections to texts that have been voted on in the UN system have not been limited to the Security Council and the General Assembly. On Friday (4), the Human Rights Council approved the proposal to create an international commission of inquiry into violations of humanitarian law after the invasion.
Although he was in favor of opening the investigation, the head of Brazil’s permanent delegation in Geneva, Ambassador Tovar da Silva Nunes, justified the vote with reservations to different parts of the analyzed document. He said that much of the language used in the writing was inspired by recent initiatives in the Security Council and that concepts related to human and refugee rights had become “inaccurate”. “In the context of the Human Rights Council, this language constitutes an unjustifiable precedent that only exacerbates the politicization of our deliberations.”
