Silvio Berlusconi is making life difficult for Giorgia Meloni. The owner of Mediaset, a member of the alliance led by the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy, does not stop causing earthquakes of unpredictable scope. The latest are two audios leaked by the La Presse agency this week, when Meloni is in the final stretch of its negotiations to form a government. In the recordings, Berlusconi is heard openly defending the Russian president, Vladimir Putinwhile criticizing the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. An opposite position to Italy and the European Union they have kept until now.
In the most recent audio, released this Wednesday, Berlusconi explains his version of russian invasion of ukraine. “Do you know how the Russian thing happened? (…) In 2014 in Minsk, in Belarus, an agreement was signed between Ukraine and the two newly created republics of Donbas for a peace agreement (…) but Ukraine rejected land this agreement a year later and start attacking the borders of the two republics,” Berlusconi said, according to the recording.
“Then the two republics register victims among the military that reach, according to what they tell me, 5, 6 or 7,000 dead. Zelensky arrives and triples the attacks (…) The desperate republics send a delegation to Moscow and manage to talk to Putin,” he maintains. “They say: ‘Vladimir, we don’t know what to do, defend us.’ He is against any initiative, he resists, he is under strong pressure throughout Russia. So he decides to invent a special operation: troops were to enter Ukraine, reach kyiv in a week, remove the government, Zelensky etcetera, and put another one already chosen by the Ukrainian minority of good people and common sense,” he continues.
Vodka and Lambrusco
In line with this speech, Berlusconi maintains that, according to him, the war in Ukraine is being prolonged because “since the third day” kyiv is receiving money and guns of western countries. Therefore, this conflict that should “be a two-week operation, became a 200-year operation,” he explains. “Unfortunately, in the Western world there are no leadersneither in Europe nor in the United States,” he argues.
The leak occurred after Tuesday Berlusconi’s other comments to be disclosed about Putin, which his party had initially denied. Reason why La Presse finally decided on Tuesday night broadcast the audio with Berlusconi’s statements, made in a meeting that would have taken place last Monday with deputies from his party, forza italy.
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With Putin, “I have established relations,” he is heard saying on this first recording. So much so that, according to Berlusconi, he even received “20 bottles of vodka and a very sweet letter” from the Russian president for his birthday on September 29. And that, for this reason, he would also have sent Putin “bottles of Lambrusco and an equally sweet letter.”
unknown Mattarella
The new outcome is a stone in Meloni’s shoe towards the formation of a government led by his party. The far-right leader herself hastened this Wednesday to repeat again that Italy “is a full and proud member of the EU and of Europe and of the Atlantic Alliance (NATO)”, something that has also made visible her concern about the comments of his political partner. But the biggest unknown is how the President of the Republic will react to all this, Sergio Mattarellawhich begins this Thursday the consultations with the groups to order the formation of the government.