“Brazil has no position in the case of Ukraine.” The sentence that opens this column was said by a Brazilian president. Deserves a plate of varenyky of cottage cheese and blueberries – one of the wonders of Ukrainian cuisine – who gets it right. If you, induced by recent events, nailed Jair Bolsonaro, I regret to inform you. You missed. Who said that “Brazil has no position in the case of Ukraine”, in 2014, was then President Dilma Rousseff. But, as a matter of fairness, you still deserve the award. After all, when it comes to the Russian invasions of Ukraine, Rousseff and Bolsonaro are identical.
Dilma’s PT nurtures a affair long-standing relationship with Putin and Russia. For them, although the Soviet Union collapsed into thin air in 1991, it remains the cradle of a utopia. A kind of pole (eternally active) against western capitalism, which the PT eternally seeks as an inheritance of something that is imprinted in its DNA.
Recently, Bolsonarism began to melt in love with Putin. The attraction is due to the fact that the Russian autocrat has become a kind of maximum defender of morals and good customs, who fights against gender ideology, globalism, climateism and does not bend to the idiotic agenda of social movements that he occupies. the top of Western governments’ priorities. There are those who understand that on the streets of Moscow there is more freedom than in Vienna, Zurich or Stockholm. A judgment based solely on repulsion to health requirements during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The “conservative” Putin knew how to take advantage of each of the dissatisfactions in Western countries to present himself as an answer and an example, through his very efficient propaganda machine. Those who consider Putin as a model of conservatism are not far from accepting China’s dictator Xi Jinping and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the same category of moral lanterns. Xi instituted programs to foster masculinity in students who were too effeminate for the regime’s taste. Khamenei is so efficient that there are officially no gays in Iran. Those who give the smallest flag find redemption in hangings in the public square.
As can be seen, by different paths, left and right in Brazil meet in Moscow.
The longest-running love story, obviously, belongs to PT members. In 2003, in his first year of government, then-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed a contract with Ukraine for the establishment of a binational company to build rockets and launch satellites in Alcântara, Maranhão. The partnership had been stitched together by Putin, as an alternative for PT members who spent the entire previous government undermining Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s plans to set up an identical launch site, but in partnership with the Americans. PT members and the like saw serious risks to national sovereignty.
Lula showed that, with Putin’s intermediation, the partnership with the Ukrainians would place Brazil in the billionaire satellite market without dependence on the United States. The reality: the works were delayed and what was expected to be ready in three years was nothing more than civil engineering works a decade after the contract was signed. And as if that wasn’t enough, in 2013, Ukrainians rebelled against Russian influence. They put President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ventriloquist dummy, to run and began to aim for a stronger connection with the West, aspiring to join the European Union.
Coincidence or not, Brazil has cooled its relationship with the Ukrainians. They let the project die of starvation and the more than R$ 2.6 billion that the two countries had invested, until that moment, went to waste.
Putin refused to let Ukrainians turn their eyes to the West and in 2014 invaded Crimea, claiming to be defending a region of Russian identity that was at risk. Western democracies condemned Putin’s advance on the neighbor, but Dilma Rousseff (it is worth remembering) said: “Brazil has no position in the case of Ukraine”.
That same year, separatists armed by Putin shot down a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, killing 288 people. When questioned, Dilma Rousseff fired: “The Brazilian government will not take a position on this until it becomes clearer as a matter not only of seriousness, but also of prudence”.
Dilma’s “seriousness” and “prudence” are explained by another statement by the president: “There is a segment of the press saying that… this plane that was shot down was on the route of the return of President (Russian, Vladimir) Putin . It matched the time and the route. So that the missile would be aimed at President Putin’s plane.”
After that, Brazil’s space partnership with Ukraine took a turn for the worse. Dilma left letters from the then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko unanswered and ordered the budget for the program to be cut, which would eventually die of starvation.
Lula, Dilma and the PT have always dealt with Ukraine as if the country were a little bit of Russia. Whether when the Crimea was occupied in 2014, or now with the total invasion.
Not long ago, Bolsonarism dreamed of “Ukrainizing” Brazil. The term evilly associated with neo-Nazism or fascism was nothing more than a reference to the decommunization process that led Ukraine to ban the apology of communism, which, by law, came to be equated with Nazism. More than 1,000 monuments to Soviet leaders were destroyed and more than 50,000 streets and squares were renamed to replace those given to Stalin, Lenin and other Soviet monsters.
But the Ukrainianization of Brazil seems to have happened otherwise. From Lula, passing through Dilma and reaching Bolsonaro, Brazil allows itself to be Ukrainianized, functioning as a satellite of Moscow’s interests.
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