Mario Draghi and Luigi di Maio
War, Italy irrelevant. Berlusconi, Salvini and 5 Stelle’s ties with Putin weigh heavily
Great Italy absent on a European and international level. There is nothing to be done, the days go by, the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine it does not stop and our country remains on the sidelines of fragile diplomatic attempts to stop the conflict. Already the European Union certainly does not have a great deal of influence and the hopes of finding at least an agreement on the ceasefire lie mainly in China. Xi Jinping, an ally of Moscow who fears above all the economic consequences of the war. The main players are then the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennett.
When Joe Biden talks about Europe (in addition of course to the historic axis with the United Kingdom led by Boris Johnson) he always quotes France and Germany or, alternatively, the countries of the eastern front of the BORN how Poland, Baltic Republics or Romania. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken closed his European tour with a bilateral at the Elysée, meeting with his French counterpart Jean Yves Le Drian and President Emmanuel Macron.
Previously, the French head of state had an unprecedented three-way call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Chinese President Xi Jinpingin an attempt to remove Beijing from Moscow. Xi had called for restraint, supporting Franco-German attempts to reach a ceasefire in Ukraine and guarantee civilians access to humanitarian aid.
It’s Italy? Zero. There is no trace in the international press of Mario Draghi, the authoritative prime minister who according to the majority parties should have taken over the European Union after Angela Merkel left the scene. Same goes for Luigi Di Maioforeign minister absent from the tables that really matter to stop the bloody war in Ukraine.
But what is the reason for this absolute marginality of Italy? In the United States they know perfectly well that the two main parties of the majority, at least in terms of numbers in Parliament, M5S and Lega, have a pro-Putin past. Matteo Salvini, fresh from the “accident” of image on his trip to Poland, met Tsar Vladimir twice: the first in October 2014, when the secretary of the Northern League had met the Russian president on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe summit (ASEM) , held in Milan on October 16-17.
Then on 4 July 2019, less than three years ago, Putin was on a visit to Rome and here he met the then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and the two vice presidents of the Council, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini. But the reliability problem for Washington is not only the League, but also the grillini. The White House and the State Department have certainly not forgotten when the current Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Manlio Di Stefano, very close to the head of the Farnesina, in 2016 went to Moscow at the congress of Putin’s United Russia party, declaring that “in Ukraine there was an EU and NATO coup“(the reference is to the so-called revolution of Maidan square, in Kiev, which led to the exit of the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych).
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