By Anthony Boadle
BRASILIA (Reuters) – U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield has encouraged Brazil to include Ukraine in any efforts to negotiate an end to “Russia’s war of aggression,” she said on Thursday at the end of a visit to the South American country.
Thomas-Greenfield said she expressed U.S. disappointment in Brasilia over the statements made regarding the war, referring to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s comments calling on the West to stop arming Ukraine to allow peace talks to start.
“We are not telling Brazil not to engage on peace,” the ambassador told a news conference.
“What we said is that any engagement has to take Ukraine into account, and it cannot be a negotiation based on rewarding Russia for taking territory during their unprovoked war on Ukraine,” she said.
Thomas-Greenfield said she encouraged Brazilian officials to visit Ukraine and confirmed that Lula’s foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, plans to travel to Kyiv though he gave no date.
“My assumption is that it is going be soon,” she told reporters.
Fighting climate change, defending democracy and promoting racial equality and inclusion were on her agenda of discussions with Brazilian officials during the three-day visit that included a trip to former colonial capital Salvador in the northern state of Bahia, which she called “the heart of Black Brazil.”
The relations between the two largest democracies in the Western Hemisphere are “enduring and built on shared values,” she said.
Thomas-Greenfield recalled that at the United Nations Brazil supported an early U.N. resolution in the General Assembly condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and more recently a U.N. peace resolution.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle in Brasilia; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
