Kiev's ambassador to Brazil: Zelensky renewed his invitation to Lula to learn about Ukrainian pain

The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, renewed the invitation to his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to visit his country to "get to know and feel the pain and suffering of the Ukrainians" involved in the conflict with Russia. This was stated by the new ambassador of Ukraine in Brasilia, Andrii Melnyk, in an interview with the newspaper “O Globo”. The two heads of state met for about an hour in a bilateral meeting held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, United States. Second Melnyk, Zelensky asked Lula to have “greater understanding regarding the evil genocidal nature of the Russian military invasion” against the country and asked the Brazilian president to review his position on selling munitions to the Ukrainians. In any case, Melnyk assessed the meeting as "frank and respectful", as well as "of crucial importance" for a rapprochement that "opens a new page in our bilateral relations".

The bilateral meeting served to discuss opportunities for dialogue so that, Lula declared to the media, "a territorial occupation like the one carried out by Russia will never happen again". Brazil, she added, insisted on the idea of ​​creating a group of neutral countries capable of guaranteeing a dialogue between Moscow and Kiev. TO Zelensky “I spoke about the need to find a group of friendly countries capable of building a proposal that does not belong to either of the two parties, of the two countries that are at war. And I also remembered", Lula reported, "that a negotiation at a dialogue table is much more convenient than a war, there are no victims, there are no deaths and not even a shot".

For his part, Zelensky spoke of an "important" meeting with Lula. “Following the sincere and constructive dialogue held, we have instructed our diplomatic teams to continue our bilateral relations and peace efforts,” wrote the Ukrainian president in a message published on his profile sincere" the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, also spoke, while his Brazilian counterpart, Mauro Vieira, reported "an excellent mutual understanding". “President Lula informed Zelensky that the special advisor to the Presidency of the Republic, Celso Amorim, will continue to participate in the meetings of the so-called Copenhagen Process,” said Vieira, also reporting Zelensky's thanks for the efforts carried out by Brasilia.

The meeting follows a long distant discussion between the two presidents. Brazil, despite being among the first countries to condemn Russia's invasion, never agreed to provide technical or military support to Ukraine. Controversy also arose due to other distinctions made by Lula, starting from the reference to the possibility that Ukraine renounces Crimea, the peninsula under Russian control since 2014, which to Kiev However, he does not intend to give up. The Brazilian president also distanced himself from unilateral verbal condemnation of the Kremlin, recalling that a war ends if there is a will on both sides. The same proposal from a group of countries mediating the conflict, with a plan of mutual concessions by the two warring parties, has so far not received much attention from Kiev.

Lula and Zelensky they had met once in a video conference, but the one held on Wednesday evening in the USA, the night in Italy, was the first direct "face to face". A meeting should also have been held on the sidelines of the G7 work, held in May in Japan. The bilateral meeting, announced by Brazilian diplomacy, would not then be held "due to incompatibility of agendas". The South American press attributed the impossibility of confrontation to the distance between the parties. To a journalist who asked if he was disappointed by the missed meeting with Lula, Zelensky replied smiling that he would be the president of Brazil who should feel disappointed.