For many years, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has worked to build a network of strong personal contacts across Europe. Figures such as former German chancellor Angela Merkel worked behind the scenes to link the German economy with Russia, explains journalist and Euronews analyst Alberto de Filippis.
Europe behaved like a drug addict ( in the case of Europe, gas) at a low price until it becomes dependent on them and can no longer do without them. This testifies not only to naivety, but also to a non-existent geopolitical vision of the future.
Among Putin's closest friends is Silvio Berlusconi
On October 19, 2022, the LaPresse agency published an audio recording, secretly made during a meeting of Forza Italia in the Lower House, in which Silvio Berlusconi talks about his own vision of the war in Ukraine. According to the ex-premier, the conflict arose because of Ukraine and its President Vladimir Zelensky, and Putin was allegedly forced to start a war against his will. The next day, in an interview with Corriere della Sera, the Forza Italia leader defended himself against the flurry of criticism that had fallen on him in the past few hours, and said that he did not want to give “any interpretation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
According to According to Berlusconi, he and Putin exchanged birthday gifts (Berlusconi turned 86 on September 29, Putin turned 70 on October 7).
“For my birthday, he sent me 20 bottles of vodka and a very nice letter,” Berlusconi says in the audio recording. “I responded with bottles of Lambrusco and an equally sweet letter.” He adds: “I was one of his first five real friends.”
Pay attention! A few days before the election, on September 25, Berlusconi made similar statements as a guest at Rai1's leading political talk show “Porta a Porta”, stating that Putin's goal is to replace Zelensky with “good people”, and that's exactly what he also uses in the audio recording published by LaPresse.
What is true and what is false in the words of the leader of Forza Italia
Has Ukraine violated the Minsk agreements? Silvio lies again
“2014, in Minsk, Ukraine and the two republics of Donbass signed a peace agreement, according to which no one attacks anyone. Ukraine violates this agreement a year later and begins to attack the borders of the two republics”.
Outright lies. The first ceasefire agreement was signed in Minsk in September 2014 to stop the violence that broke out in the Ukrainian Donbas in April of that year after the attack by pro-Russian separatists on district administrations in some areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. However, the truce was not valid, and soon clashes and violence began again on both sides.
After several months of fighting, in February 2015, a second ceasefire agreement was again reached in Minsk. Here, in particular, Russia and Ukraine agreed that the breakaway regions would return to full Ukrainian control and that Ukraine would approve constitutional reform to give them a special status. These two conditions never became a reality.
In general, Berlusconi's words that this “peace agreement” was violated by Ukraine's decision to attack the borders of two self-proclaimed separatist republics are a lie. As can be read in various reports (for example, in a 2017 report by Human Rights Watch, a human rights NGO), the 2015 accords in Minsk led to an overall decrease in fighting and violence, even if there were frequent ceasefire violations
According to the UN, the number of civilian deaths decreased from 2,084 in 2014 to 955 in 2015 and to 112 in 2016. In the period from 2014 to 2015, according to data cited by experts from the University of Uppsala, the number of those killed in battles, both military and civilian, also decreased, the same applies to the period from 2015 to 2016. Subsequently, until 2022, the level of armed confrontation in the Donbass remained at a lower intensity.
In general, when we talk about the failure to implement the Minsk agreements, we mean, on the one hand, Ukraine's disapproval of the constitutional reform that guarantees autonomy to separatist regions , and on the other hand, the failure to return control for Kyiv over the separatist regions led by Russia.
Contrary to what Berlusconi said, who insisted that Ukraine attacked the separatists, we can say that at a general level, a truce took place, with a sharp drop in violence and deaths between 2015 and 2022, even if we consider that there were violations of the ceasefire fire.
The dead in the separatist republics
“Two republics suffer losses among the military, who arrive, according to my data, up to 5 – 7 thousand dead”.
The figures given by Berlusconi are correct. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from April 2014 to December 2021, about 14,000 people died in the conflict in Donbas.
Did Zelensky really “triple the attacks on Donbas”
Silvio said: “Zelensky is escalating: attacks on two republics have tripled.”
This accusation is unfounded. Volodymyr Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine in May 2019, and since the beginning of his mandate, he has been trying to negotiate with Russia on a diplomatic solution to the Donbass problem.
As attempts at negotiations continued, it is a lie that Ukrainian attacks on the self-proclaimed Lugansk and Donetsk republics have tripled, as Berlusconi said. The data on civilian deaths and those killed in action, both military and civilian, already cited above, indicates that there was no increase in attacks from May 2019 to February 2022, given the decrease compared to previous years.
According to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the largest intergovernmental regional security organization to promote peace, the number of ceasefire violations and violence in general decreased in 2019 compared to 2018.
The OSCE recorded reduced violations and violence also in 2020 and 2021. Contrary to what Berlusconi has said, from when Zelensky became president of Ukraine in May 2019 to the Russian invasion in February 2022, violence in the Donbass has decreased compared to the previous time.
In addition to these statements, Berlusconi also made other false statements. Among other things, the leader of Forza Italia said, for example, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was forced to wage a war that he allegedly did not want to start in order to establish “a government that has already chosen a Ukrainian minority of good and kind people.”
Berlusconi also added that after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army “faced unforeseen resistance from the Ukrainians, who from the third day began to receive money and weapons from the West.” It is clear that Western military assistance to Ukraine did not begin “from the third day” after the Russian invasion, but years earlier, and grew after the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014.
Also unverifiable is the part of Berlusconi's speech in which he says that Putin planned to get to Kyiv “in a week” and “overthrow the current government in a short time.” The speech in which Putin actually announced the invasion of Ukraine on February 24 would seem to confirm this thesis, but in war, secret documents often have more value than public statements. In any case, it seems undeniable that something in Putin's plans did not work and that Russia found itself and is in an “unforeseen” situation, as Berlusconi claimed.
Georgia Maloney, the future Italian prime minister, is making efforts to distance herself from Russia, describing Moscow's invasion as “an unacceptable large-scale act of war by Putin's Russia against Ukraine” and advocates sending weapons to Ukraine.
Silvio Berlusconi is a demonstration of Putin's strategy of disorientation. Putin has found friends both on the left and on the right (Berlusconi has always claimed to be a sincere anti-communist).
Moscow does not want a stable and pro-Atlantic Italian government. Now it is the center-right coalition that must support the prime minister and the leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, who have reaffirmed their loyalty to NATO and support for Ukraine. And then saboteurs come in from the right, like Silvio Berlusconi, who starts digging under the first potential female prime minister in Italian history, his own coalition and all European and non-European allies. Perfect job. According to some analysts, the Russian president has dirt on Silvio Berlusconi.
Secrets, if revealed, will make people forget about the elderly leader's sex scandals. Berlusconi is described as an elderly and sick man, with a certain stupefaction. But the truth, most likely, is different and, perhaps, in Moscow they know about it.
