Lula, former Brazilian President, Talks to TIME About Ukraine

Time.org

By Ciara Nugent/São Paulo, Brazil
May 4, 2022 7:01 AM EDT


I want to speak about the war in Ukraine. You have always prided yourself on being able to speak to everyone—Hugo Chavez as much as George Bush. But the world today is very fragmented diplomatically. I want to know if your approach still works. Could you speak to Vladimir Putin after what he’s done in Ukraine?

We politicians reap what we sow. If I sow fraternity, solidarity, harmony, I’ll reap good things. If I sow discord, I’ll reap quarrels. Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The U.S. and the E.U. are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the U.S. and Europe should have said: “Ukraine won’t join NATO.” That would have solved the problem.


Lula, former Brazilian President and 2022 presidential candidate, photographed in São Paulo on March 23. Luisa Dörr for TIME


Do you think the threat of Ukraine joining NATO was Russia’s real reason?

That’s the argument they put forward. If they have a secret one, we don’t know. The other issue was Ukraine joining the E.U. The Europeans could have said: “No, now is not the moment for Ukraine to join the E.U., we’ll wait.” They didn’t have to encourage the confrontation.

But I think they did try to speak to Russia.

No, they didn’t. The conversations were very few. If you want peace, you have to have patience. They could have sat at a negotiating table for 10, 15, 20 days, a whole month, trying to find a solution. I think dialogue only works when it is taken seriously.

If you were President right now, what would you do? Would you have been able to avoid the conflict?

I don’t know if I’d be able to. If I was President, I would have phoned [Joe] Biden, and Putin, and Germany, and [Emmanuel] Macron. Because war is not the solution. I think the problem is that if you don’t try, you don’t fix things. And you have to try.

I sometimes get worried. I was very concerned when the U.S. and the E.U. adopted [Juan] Guaidó [then leader of Venezuela’s parliament] as President of the country [in 2019]. You don’t play with democracy. For Guaidó to be President, he would have to be elected. Bureaucracy can’t substitute politics. In politics, it’s two heads of state who are governing, both elected by their people, who have to sit down at the negotiating table and look each other in the eye and talk.

And now, sometimes I sit and watch the President of Ukraine speaking on television, being applauded, getting a standing ovation by all the [European] parliamentarians. This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war. Because in the war, there’s not just one person guilty. Saddam Hussein was as guilty as Bush [for the outbreak of the 2003 Iraq war]. Because Saddam Hussein could have said, “You can come here and check and I will prove that I do not have mass destruction weapons.” But he lied to his people. And now, this President of Ukraine could have said, “Come on, let’s stop talking about this NATO business, about joining the E.U. for a while. Let’s discuss a bit more first.”

So Volodomyr Zelensky should have talked to Putin more, even with 100,000 Russian troops at his border?

I don’t know the President of Ukraine. But his behavior is a bit weird. It seems like he’s part of the spectacle. He is on television morning, noon, and night. He is in the U.K. parliament, the German parliament, the French parliament, the Italian parliament, as if he were waging a political campaign. He should be at the negotiating table.

Can you really say that to Zelensky? He didn’t want a war, it came to him.

He did want war. If he didn’t want war, he would have negotiated a little more. That’s it. I criticized Putin when I was in Mexico City [in March], saying that it was a mistake to invade. But I don’t think anyone is trying to help create peace. People are stimulating hate against Putin. That won’t solve things! We need to reach an agreement. But people are encouraging [the war]. You are encouraging this guy [Zelensky], and then he thinks he is the cherry on your cake. We should be having a serious conversation: “OK, you were a nice comedian. But let us not make war for you to show up on TV.” And we should say to Putin: “You have a lot of weapons, but you don’t need to use them on Ukraine. Let’s talk!”

What do you think of Joe Biden?

I actually made a speech praising Biden when he announced his economic program. The problem is it’s not enough to announce the program, you’ve got to execute it. And I think Biden is going through a difficult moment.

And I don’t think he has taken the right decision on the war between Russia and Ukraine. The U.S. has a lot of political clout. And Biden could have avoided [the war], not incited it. He could have talked more, participated more. Biden could have taken a plane to Moscow to talk to Putin. This is the kind of attitude you expect from a leader. To intervene so that things don’t go off the rails. I don’t think he did that.

Should Biden have made concessions to Putin?

No. In the same way that the Americans persuaded the Russians not to put missiles in Cuba in 1961, Biden could have said: “We’re going to speak a bit more. We don’t want Ukraine in NATO, full stop.” That’s not a concession. Let me tell you something: if I were President of Brazil and they said to me, “Brazil can join NATO,” I’d say no.

Why?

Because I’m a guy who only thinks about peace, not war. […] Brazil doesn’t have disputes with any country: not with the U.S., not China, nor Russia, nor Bolivia, nor Argentina, nor Mexico. And the fact that Brazil is a peaceful country will allow us to reestablish the relationships we created between 2003 and 2010. Brazil will once again become a protagonist on the world stage, because we will prove it’s possible to have a better world.

How will you do that?

We need to create a new global governance. Today’s United Nations doesn’t represent anything anymore. The U.N. isn’t taken seriously by governments today, because each one makes decisions without respecting it. Putin invaded Ukraine unilaterally, without consulting the U.N. The U.S. is used to invading countries without asking anyone and without respecting the Security Council. So we need to rebuild the U.N., to include more countries and more people. If we do that, we can start to improve the world.

In Brazil, during the pandemic, the Black population had a higher risk of death than white people, and a higher unemployment rate because of the pandemic as well. And Brazil’s police-violence problem has only worsened during the Bolsonaro government. What will you do to improve the world for Black Brazilians specifically?

I read a lot about slavery when I was in prison. And sometimes it’s difficult for me to understand what it means to have had 350 years of slavery. It’s difficult for me to understand that slavery is in people’s minds. And on the outskirts of Brazilian cities, we have thousands of young people dying almost every month, every year. It cannot continue. When I was President, we enacted a law to tell African history in Brazilian schools. So we would not see Africans as inferior people. So you know, we have to have this type of education at home and in schools. But Bolsonaro woke up hatred, prejudice. And there are other Presidents in Europe, in Hungary. A lot of fascists, Nazis, are popping up across the world.