Italy is firmly on Ukraine’s side and also wants to play a leading role in the reconstruction of the country, which has been plagued by a year of war. Giorgia Meloni lands after weeks that haven’t been easy due to the storm sparked by Silvio Berlusconi’s words about Volodymyr Zelensky Warsaw. A city that will also become the starting point of a long journey that will take her to Kiev, where she will have the long-awaited meeting with the President of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, face to face with his friend Mateusz Morawiecki, who shares militancy in the European conservative faction with the prime minister. An opportunity to also refer to the sending of military supplies so that Ukrainians can defend themselves and strive for “peace and stability”. Finally, the conversation with President Duda. The appointment with the Polish Prime Minister comes at a time when even American President Joe Biden is about to arrive in a bad-weather-stricken capital, early and surprisingly, having just returned from a lightning visit to Ukraine. But the agendas of the two leaders do not cross. Meloni arrives in the late afternoon and resumes his public appearances after a flu that kept her away from institutional commitments for a week and which still leaves some lingering effects in her voice: “We are human,” she will only say in front of Polish journalists , makes fun of the coughing fits that force her to pause several times while speaking. Italy and Poland have a strong bond, he says, so much so that they are the “only two nations to mention the other in their national anthem”. A bond that can only “grow” further. All the more so when their respective governments are headed by two representatives of the European conservatives who also have a common vision of the common struggles in Brussels.
The meeting with the Polish Prime Minister will take stock of the migrant dossier, another issue dear to Rome and Warsaw. The two question Europe: “Brussels has to take care of the problem,” says Morawiecki. Meloni hits out even harder: “We can no longer allow human trafficking gangs to make the choice of arriving people, we must not confuse migration and refugees.” It’s easy to guess that Europe is the stone guest face-to-face, too when it comes to helping companies: “We know that the EU needs very concrete measures to defend its companies,” continues Meloni, whom he invites to change from Brussels “to a political and unbureaucratic giant, in to which the principle of subsidiarity applies”. But military aid to Kiev is the high point of the talk between the two. “We talked about future deliveries to Ukraine for peace and stability,” Morawiecki makes clear. Words repeated by the prime minister reaffirming Italy’s “all-round” proximity to Kiev. “We were there and we will be there,” Meloni repeats.
The prime minister has repeatedly announced her intention to visit Kiev ahead of the anniversary of the start of the conflict on February 24. He talked about it in his brief conversation in Brussels with Zelenskyy, whom he plans to meet in Kiev in the next few hours. Security reasons force Palazzo Chigi to maintain maximum confidentiality over details up to the last minute, but the Italian delegation should proceed along the lines of the many visits that have followed one another to the Ukrainian capital in a year of war. Meloni arrives as pacifists across the world, including Italy, prepare to return to the streets to demand an end to hostilities. And this in a context where, according to polls, 51% of Italians are in favor of supporting Ukraine, as was also noted by the Italian media in the interview with Zelenskyy. Support that the President of Ukraine considers “fundamental” and that the Prime Minister will reaffirm by visiting the symbolic places of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression. The visit to Kiev could also be an opportunity to reinvigorate the idea of a reconstruction conference, possibly held in Italy, once conditions are right. In the meantime, the government, together with the Italian companies involved, is preparing the ground after Confindustria reopened its representative office in Ukraine in January – on the occasion of a visit by Carlo Bonomi together with Economics Minister Adolfo Urso.
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