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Lula wants to mediate in Ukraine, but he already failed against Iran in his previous presidency


A year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some voices are raising the urgency to start peace negotiations now. Among those offering mediation, China stands out, which is putting on the table a plan that Western countries consider useless; The Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, also stands out, although the leader of the Workers’ Party did not present the conditions in which rapprochement between the two parties to the conflict could be achieved.

Lula wants to gain global fame, relying on the international weight of Brazil as a middle power, with open channels of dialogue with both Xi Jinping, with whom he sits at the BRICS, and with Joe Biden, whom he met two weeks ago at the conference. White House. Although at the start of the war, before he became president, Lula was more on Putin’s side than Zelensky, and since then he has heeded his tone and in Friday’s vote at the United Nations, Brazil spoke out against the invasion: do anything else that would delegitimize About him (in the context of Latin America, only Nicaragua voted against the declaration and Bolivia, Cuba and El Salvador abstained; the rest, including reluctant Mexico or Argentina, joined that day the international community as a whole).

The deal with Iran damaged Lula and Obama’s relationship

Lula had already tried to come close to running for the Nobel Peace Prize in his previous presidential term, mediating in 2010 to solve a problem. Nuclear conflict with Iran. Signing a draft agreement with the President of the Republic Mahmoud AhmadinejadIn it said the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip ErdoganIt ended up upsetting countries that had been pressuring Tehran for a long time to give up uranium enrichment that could lead to the achievement of the atomic bomb.

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Lula came to travel to Tehran to close the joint declaration of May 17, 2010, according to which Iran accepted in principle an offer it had begun to consider a few months earlier: to send Russia and France 1,200 kilograms of enriched uranium between 3.% and 5% of the 1,500 that He has accumulated and obtained the same amount of uranium, but it is enriched to approximately 20%, for use in the nuclear research reactor in Tehran to produce medical isotopes. The exchange, which was to take place in Turkey, allowed the civilian use of nuclear material by the Iranians while reassuring other powers that the ayatollahs’ regime was not involved in enriching uranium at dangerous levels. Convinced that this was a major diplomatic success, Marco Aurelio García, Lula’s foreign policy advisor, suggested that the usual Iranian dialogue move from P5+1 (the five nations of the UN Security Council, plus Germany) to P5+3, to also include Brazil and Turkey. .

However, on the same day that the agreement was to be announced, the director of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, confirmed that his country would not stop enriching uranium to higher levels, thus agreeing with the Obama administration in its distrust. Iran’s goodwill negotiation. Both for Obama, and then also for Vladimir Putin, Tehran just wanted to buy time and prevent the imposition of a fifth round of international sanctions.

The failure of the talks that Washington and Moscow loved, on the basis of false premises, went too far, impeding the general consensus on imposing new sanctions on Iran, and hurting Obama’s relationship with Lula, who was ending his second term. The P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran was not reached until 2015, once the increase in sanctions doubled down on the Iranian position (the agreement today is breached and subject to renegotiation).

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Find satisfaction in foreign policy

Now Lula wants new international leadership. He wrote last week on Twitter: “It is urgent that a group of countries, which have nothing to do with the conflict, take responsibility for promoting negotiations to restore peace.” As a result of these words, it is mentioned that last May, while he was still a candidate for re-election, Lula spoke with some disdain for the Ukrainian president in statements to the American magazine “Time”. “I see the President of Ukraine speaking on TV, and being applauded, receiving a warm welcome from all European parliamentarians,” he said at the time. This man is as responsible as Putin for the war. “Because there is not a single culprit in the war,” he added.

Upon his return to the presidency of Brazil, Lula will hardly reconcile the achievements in social development achieved in his first term in office (2003-2010), because the economic situation is very different from the ‘golden decade’ that we witnessed then in the whole of the south. America. He will also face Akbar internal political division. Hence, it is likely that he is looking for the greatest satisfaction in foreign policy. However, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict could bring him big problems.

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