Brazil will not join coalition to end trade with Russia

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil, along with other emerging economies, has refused to join a coalition formed by developed countries to block trade with Russia.

A statement from the United States, the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, and some smaller countries such as Iceland is expected at the trading scene in Geneva.

EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis warned that the G7 and its partners “will soon stop treating Russia as a most-favored-nation at the World Trade Organization (WTO), which would remove important trade benefits (for Russian products).”

Canada was the first G20 country to remove MFN status for Russia. Goods imported from Russia and Belarus are now taxed at 35% in Canada, whereas until then, tariffs were negligible.

At the WTO, the U.S., EU, and the U.K. are pushing politically for more countries to impose an embargo on Russian exports, based on a WTO article on national security.

According to sources, however, it is not only emerging economies that have refused to join the coalition. Countries like Switzerland and Singapore, which have imposed sanctions on Moscow, have also dropped out of the initiative.”

The assessment is that sanctions against Moscow, for example, in commodity trade, would exacerbate the global crisis.

According to specific sources, “there are qualifications and antagonisms even among the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), despite the strong condemnation of Russia by the U.S., the EU, and the United Kingdom.

In the case of Brazil, diplomacy has affirmed the need to bring Russia to the negotiating table in multilateral forums to pressure it regarding the effects of the war that harm the entire world.

And it prefers to focus on condemning Russia in the Security Council, the UN General Assembly, and the Human Rights Council.

The emerging movement in the G20 also seems to remind some commentators of the Non-Aligned Movement in the past.

As one source notes, Brazil has never belonged to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) but believes that it makes perfect sense for the country not to join a pole automatically.

He notes that Brazil is a Western Hemisphere democracy with a market economy that is culturally close to the “West” but has Asia as its largest trading partner, whose share of Brazilian imports is growing.

At the same time, Europe and the United States are hampering Brazilian agricultural exports. “We have no other option but to be a global player,” the source said.