Bolsonaro’s Russia neutrality will get him nowhere

Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil during a February meeting in Moscow. Photo: Kremlin

Brazil’s response to the ongoing war in Eastern Europe — a war, it must be noted, precipitated by the ruthless bellicosity of President Vladimir Putin of Russia — has revealed conflicting tendencies in the diplomacy of Latin America’s largest nation. These competing impulses have deep historical roots. President Jair Bolsonaro has been loath to openly criticize Mr. Putin.

Indeed, on his visit to Moscow mere days before the invasion of its sovereign neighbor to the west, Mr. Bolsonaro expressed solidarity with Vladimir Putin without defining exactly what he meant.

Since then, as Anthony Faiola and Lesley Wroughton noted in The Washington Post, Mr. Bolsonaro has insisted Brazil “‘will not take sides’ in the conflict, even as he dismissed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky as ‘a comedian.’” Whatever one thinks of NATO expansionism over the past two decades, an unwillingness to explicitly condemn Mr. Putin at the height of the brutal campaign he is waging against Ukraine has been widely interpreted as tacit support for Russia’s aggressive tactics.

Mr. Bolsonaro is using Brazil’s long-standing tradition of foreign policy independence...

Andre Pagliarini

Andre Pagliarini is an assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Before that, he taught Latin American history at Dartmouth, Wellesley, and Brown, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2018. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the politics of nationalism in 20th-century Brazil.