Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will arrive in Moscow later this week for talks with President Vladimir Putin and to attend Russia's Victory Day May 9 celebrations, marking Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany in 1945.

The Kremlin engagement serves a calculated dual purpose for Brasília's foreign policy ambitions, according to Brazilian officials cited by O Globo. By standing alongside Putin at the Red Square military parade – an event Western leaders have boycotted – Lula aims to establish Brazil as a potential peace broker in the Ukraine war while flaunting his nation's diplomatic autonomy.

"President Lula does not want to align himself with just one camp," Angelo Segrillo, Russia specialist at the University of São Paulo, told O Globo. "He does not want to distance himself from the United States and other Western countries, but he also does not want to miss what he considers the train of the future, which is the BRICS side of China and also Russia."

Ukraine's ambassador to Brazil has offered a stark assessment of the relationship between Brasília and Moscow. In a recent interview with RBC-Ukraine, Andrii Melnyk claimed that since Russia's full-scale invasion, "the formal strategic partnership between Brazil and Russia has become a strategic one in substance." The diplomat pointed at Russia's growing economic clout, noting its monopolistic position in Brazil's diesel imports, which has surged from less than 1% in 2021 to 65% today. "Brazil paid Russia almost $10bn for 6.5mn tons of diesel," Melnyk said, equating this sum to "about one-tenth of the total defence budget of Russia."

To this end, beyond geopolitical positioning, talks between Lula and Putin will address commercial ties. Trade between the nations reached $12.4bn in 2024, heavily skewed in Russia's favour with a $9.5bn Brazilian deficit. Russian diesel and fertilisers – critical inputs for Brazil's agricultural powerhouse – dominate imports.

Brazil's diplomatic initiative leverages its current chairmanship of BRICS, which has expanded to include 11 emerging economies making up 40% of global GDP.

The Brazilian push comes amid perceived stagnation in US-led peace efforts. Despite being the principal interlocutor between Moscow and Kyiv and pledging to “bring the war to an end” within his first 24 hours in office, US President Donald Trump has struggled to establish meaningful dialogue between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Meanwhile, while claiming to remain neutral about the conflict, Brazilian officials believe Russia has shown more receptiveness to negotiation than Kyiv. Last September, Brazil joined China at the UN in an initiative named “Group of Friends of Peace”, aimed at proposing talks that would prevent battlefield expansion and conflict escalation. But the plan was outrightly rejected by Zelensky, who labelled it “destructive.”

It is no surprise, then, that Lula’s long-announced Moscow visit stirred anger in Ukraine. Melnyk recently travelled to Brasília to urge him, if not to turn down Putin’s invitation, to at least include Ukraine in his itinerary, only to be received by Vice President Geraldo Alckmin rather than Lula himself.

Lula's presence at Victory Day celebrations alongside authoritarian regional leaders such as Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro – who Brazil harshly criticised in the wake of his disputed re-election last year – and Cuba's Miguel Díaz-Canel is also set to spell trouble at home, where he is rumoured to seek re-election next year amid sky-high disapproval ratings primarily due to a flagging economy. Yet it displays a headstrong willingness to engage with nations outside the Western orbit, especially emerging powers under the BRICS umbrella ahead of the bloc’s Rio summit in July.