BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sent his top foreign policy adviser to speak to Russian leader Vladimir Putin about potential peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, CNN Brasil reported on Monday.
“It would be an exaggeration to say the doors are open (to peace talks), but it’s not true to say they are totally closed,” the envoy Celso Amorim told CNN Brasil in an interview published on its website.
Amorim, who was Lula’s foreign minister from 2003 to 2010, said he met with Putin for an hour on Thursday at the Kremlin as part of the previously unannounced trip.
Two government officials told Reuters that Amorim stopped in Paris on his way back to Brazil, but they provided no details of his engagements there.
Brazil’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on Amorim’s trip. The president’s office did not reply to a request for comment.
Lula has proposed creating a group of countries to mediate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in a war that has raged for more than a year.
Amorim said he had lunch with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who will visit Brasilia on April 17, and was received by Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and international affairs advisor Yuri Ushakov.
“There is no magic solution. But there will come a time when, on one side or the other, a realization will emerge that the cost of war – not just the political cost, but the human and economic cost – will be greater than the cost of the concessions needed for peace,” Amorim told CNN Brasil.
“My sense is that this moment has not arrived yet, but it could arrive sooner than expected,” he added.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Lisandra Paraguassu; Editing by Brad Haynes and Jonathan Oatis)
