Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has said he agrees that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February “would not have happened” if Donald Trump was still U.S. President.
Bolsonaro, himself dubbed the ‘Tropical Trump’ or ‘Trump of the Tropics’ during and after his first successful presidential run in 2018, made the remarks in an interview with Brazilian news magazine Veja.
“Some think that the war in Ukraine would not have happened if he were still in power,” Bolsonaro said President Trump, in comments from the interview quoted by the Reuters news wire agency.
“I agree with that,” he added, for the avoidance of doubt.
Bolsonaro’s assessment seems likely to raise hackles in the White House, particularly given Trump has himself blamed incumbent President Joe Biden and the former Obama-Biden administration for the February invasion and 2014 annexation of Crimea.
“If properly handled, there was absolutely no reason that the situation currently happening in Ukraine should have happened at all. I know Vladimir Putin very well, and he would have never done during the Trump Administration what he is doing now, no way,” he said in a statment on February 22nd.
President Bolsonaro is currently heading into a second round run-off election against socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, himself a former Brazilian president but barred from running for office again due to multiple corruption convictions until 2021, when a Federal Tribunal (STF) Justice controversially overturned the verdicts.
Trump “strongly” endorsed Bolsonaro ahead of the first round of the presidential race, calling him “a fantastic leader, a fantastic man, [and] one of the great presidents of any country in the world.”
Bolsonaro beat the polls by a wide margin in the first round following Trump’s endorsement, coming in at 43.3 per cent — well above the 35 per cent a poll published by the firms Ipespe and Abrapel had predicted.
“I think he’s in great shape to win on October 30th,” Trump told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
“The people that got out largely were conservatives, the ones who lost, so the votes should go to Bolsonaro,” he predicted.