Daniele Dell’Orco June 13, 2022
Mass communication is a very delicate business. Sudden spotlights are, editorial needs are, and audience expectations are. As it was with the pandemic, with mainstream medical professionals becoming TV superstars and dying in the most unscientific and grotesque pronouncements possible, so is the war in Ukraine. Seized by the frantic need to profile as quickly as possible people suitable to fill one position or another, newspapers, television and websites around geopolitical experts, philosophers, retired soldiers etc. have forced the news to simplify reduce to hunt by adapting their contours to one’s desire. It can happen that the line between serious and joking becomes blurred. It happened to Prof. Alessandro Orsini. It happens with the gen. Fabio Mini. They have two things in common: the accusations of pro-Putinism and the newspaper that hired them, namely the Fatto Quotidiano.
On the paper, directed by Marco Travaglio, Mini, General of the Army Corps of the Italian Army, former Chief of Staff of the NATO Command for Southern Europe and Commander of the KFOR Mission in Kosovo, speaks very often about the military balance in the field but also, and above all, the role played by the Atlantic Alliance in the historic process that led to the clash between Ukraine and Russia. Given his background, Travaglio becomes a “shield” behind the Mini name in many of his television appearances when he reveals some concepts and repeats: “General Fabio Mini says so”. Which, however, is sometimes not exactly a sentence. Critics have counted him among the names that would knowingly or unknowingly pull the sprint into the Italian Kremlin. However, some had already attacked him before the war for his externalization of the theory of chemtrails as a form of environmental conflict.
THE SHIELD OF TRAVAGLIO
The war in Ukraine made matters worse. For example, Mini wrote in recent weeks that Finland and Sweden had decided to join NATO because “under the pressure bordering on blackmail that the USA and Great Britain are already exerting on European countries”. A few days later, at the Riformista, he actually thought they were potential “Trojan horses” that could split NATO. In short, the US and UK would put pressure on the snakes’ alliance. Many earlier, at the end of March, Mini wrote: «The Russian military columns advanced according to plan. The goal is not to take the capital, but to control the East». A narrative very similar to that of the Kremlin, but it’s impossible to deny that withdrawing from a capital he believed (and hoped) might fall within days wasn’t very “strategic”.
Mini remains convinced of this and also returns the allegations of the “unexpected slowness” of the Russian approach to the sender: “It is only the consequence of having achieved the goals”. The? The Stigma Across the West and the Shutdown of Peace Talks? Zelensky’s reinforcements, whom they wanted to overthrow? Oh yes, according to Mini, that would also be a lie: “On the contrary, Russia is trying to keep him in power by pressuring him into negotiations by encircling Kyiv.” But that’s not what Putin said on February 25 when he called on the Ukrainian military to stage a coup against Zelenskyy and his “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.” Finally, on May 30, Mini commented on Russian losses in battle, around 30,000 according to Ukrainian and British estimates, and wrote: “These are significant losses, but consistent with the nature of the ongoing battle.” But in 100 days it is already more than during the war in Afghanistan (26,000 dead). With a small detail: it lasted 10 years (!).
