Will Latin America be able to maintain its ambiguous position after a year of war in Ukraine?

This distant, or rather ambiguous, position was evident in the meeting between Joe Biden and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on February 11 in Washington. There, far from agreeing to join the leadership of the president of the United States to unite the world community against the Russian invasion, the new Brazilian president offered to lead a “peace club” that includes countries like India and China to resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Two weeks earlier, Lula had rejected the request of the German Prime Minister, Olaf Scholz (on an official visit to Brazil), to send ammunition to Ukraine. He said that he did not want to “provoke the Russians” and added that “Russia has made a big mistake by invading another country’s territory. But I think that when you don’t want to, neither of you argues.”

Lula’s non-interventionism coincides with the position of most Latin American countries since Russia attacked Ukraine a year ago. Except for Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, and to a lesser extent Bolivia, which have endorsed the invasion, the rest of the governments have chosen to stay as far away as possible, without joining the commercial sanctions against Moscow or the shipment of arms to the Ukrainian forces.

“It’s a bit the same line as Africa,” analyzes Ignacio Hutin, an Argentine journalist expert in Eastern Europe, who covered some fighting in Ukraine: “Latin America needs investments and it doesn’t matter if they come from Russia, China, the United States, the European Union or whoever. You cannot fight with anyone”, says the author of the book “A renewed cold war” about the conflict in the Donbass.