Meeting of the former chancellor with the Ukrainian president still has no set date; information was given by Minister Márcio Macedo
The head of the special advisory service of the Presidency of the Republic for International Affairs, Celso Amorim, will travel to Kiev to meet with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. The information was released this Friday (21.Apr.2023) by the Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, Márcio Macedo.
The meeting follows Amorim’s trip to Moscow in early April, where he met with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Macedo, who makes up the Brazilian entourage on the president’s trip Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (PT) to Portugal and Spain, did not set a date for the advisor’s arrival in the Ukrainian capital and did not give details of the message that the Brazilian government will send to Ukraine.
The minister was scheduled by the government to receive Ukrainian representatives in Europe this Friday (April 21) at the Brazilian embassy in Lisbon. The association delivered a letter addressed to Lula in which it asked for greater involvement by Brazil in mediating for peace in the conflict and reinforced the invitation for the president to pay a visit to the country.
“I informed the association of Ukrainians here in Europe that the former Foreign Minister –now strategic advisor for International Affairs to the President of the Republic and the Brazilian government– will be visiting Ukraine”said Macedo in a speech to journalists after the meeting.
The initiative is part of the Brazilian government’s movement to become a neutral mediator for the conflict that broke out in February 2022.
It is also an attempt to defuse the noise left by Lula’s statements last week, when he assessed that there would be ambivalence in the blame for the conflict both in Moscow and in Kiev and suggested that the United States would be encouraging the continuation of the war.
The tone of the speech was heavily criticized by US and European Union leaders. The White House she said she was surprised by the lines and stated that the Brazilian government ignored the act of territorial aggression carried out by Moscow and reverberated Russian propaganda.
“To suggest that the US and Europe are not interested in peace or that we bear responsibility for war is clearly wrong. Of course we want an end to this war.”said US government spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday (April 18).
Questioned this Friday (April 21) about Lula’s statements, Márcio Macedo said that the president has “vocation for peace” and seeks to use his political capital to lead efforts to end the war in conjunction with a group of neutral countries, dubbed by him the “peace club”.
“I think there was an interpretation that does not match the reality of President Lula’s position”, said the minister. “[A intenção do governo] it is to find countries that have the same determination not to get involved in the conflict, not to take a position either on one side or the other in order to have the political conditions to find a path to peace and end the war”he stated.
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