Brazil’s Lula Meets Xi in China as They Seek Path to Peace in Ukraine

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil met in Beijing on Friday with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and the two leaders declared in a joint statement that negotiation was “the only viable way out of the crisis in Ukraine.”

In the statement, they avoided the words “invasion” or “war” and offered few specifics about how to bring Russia or Ukraine to the table after more than a year of war. At the same time, Mr. Lula called on Friday for China’s territorial integrity to be respected with regards to Taiwan, a similar stance to the one President Emmanuel Macron of France took last weekend after he met with Mr. Xi in China.

The joint statement underscored the delicate lines that China and Brazil have tried to chart on the war in Ukraine: Each has refused to take an explicit side, has called for peace talks and has preserved business ties with Russia. Beijing, in particular, has aligned itself with Moscow in countering American influence abroad and what Mr. Xi calls a U.S. campaign to prevent China’s rise.

The careful positioning by Mr. Xi and Mr. Lula stands against the backdrop of Beijing’s worsening relations with Washington on a range of issues, and as China wages a diplomatic campaign to raise its stature — and diminish that of the United States — in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

American and some European officials and have been critical of China’s 12-point outline of issues that should be considered in a peace agreement, because China has not suggested that Russian forces must withdraw from occupied Ukrainian territory as part of any deal.

There have been no known peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv in the past 12 months, and each side has ruled out a cease-fire based on the current battlefield conditions. On Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed a law that is set to create a system for electronic draft notices, and to make it more difficult to avoid a draft.