Silvio Berlusconi, who is said to be close to Vladimir Putin and whose party is part of Giorgia Meloni’s governing coalition, launched a new attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday.
A new statement that has made the ruling coalition in Italy uneasy. When asked about the meeting between Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Brussels on Thursday, Silvio Berlusconi replied: “I’m talking to Zelenskyy? If I had been President of the Council, I would never have gone there”.
“It was enough for him (Zelensky) to stop the attacks on the two autonomous republics of Donbass and none of this would have happened, so I judge the behavior of this gentleman very, very negatively,” he said. As a member of Italy’s ruling right-wing and far-right coalition, the former prime minister was questioned just as he was voting in Lombardy’s regional elections.
the government reorganizes
Silvio Berlusconi, 86, a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he was in power, is not his first controversial statement on the conflict in Ukraine. In September, he estimated that Vladimir Putin had been “pushed” into invading the country by his people and pro-Russian forces in Donbass. In October, an audio recording aired in the press heard the leader of the Forza Italia party declare that he had “reconnected” with Vladimir Putin and blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war.
On Sunday, his new pro-Russian statements had barely made the front page of news sites when the government issued a statement reaffirming Italy’s “firm support” for Ukraine.
“The Italian government’s support for Ukraine is firm and confident, as clearly foreseen in the program and as confirmed by all the parliamentary votes of the majority of the executive,” he said.
Giorgia Meloni, who met with the Ukrainian President in Brussels on Thursday, spoke to him about an upcoming visit to Kiev that is “in preparation”.
The left-wing opposition has also spoken out, through the voice of Democratic Party (PD) Senator Dario Parrini, to criticize “Berlusconi’s umpteenth pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine statements”. “We are an absolute anomaly: neither Germany, nor France, nor Spain or Portugal have political leaders in their government majority with such delusional positions,” he lamented on Facebook.