The leader of the center-right Forza Italia (FI) party, Silvio Berlusconi, defended this Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was pushed into the war in Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists in Donbass, the media and the Russian people and that the plan Russian was to take kyiv within a week to replace the executive with “decent people”.
The former prime minister, with known ties to the Russian president, condemned the war but said separatists from Ukraine’s Donbass region went to Moscow to tell the media that the Ukraine attacks had claimed 16,000 lives and accused Putin of do nothing to defend them. .
“Putin was pressured by the Russian population, his party and his ministers to invent this special operation,” Berlusconi, the three-time prime minister of Italy, whose party is part of the far-right coalition that polls show, said in an interview. .victory in the elections next Sunday.
The Italian media mogul stated that the plan was for Russian troops to “come in, arrive in kyiv within a week, overthrow and replace the government of President [Volodymyr] Zelensky for decent people and a week later withdraw and return to Russia.”
“Instead, they encountered unexpected resistance fueled by weapons of all kinds from the West,” Berlusconi reported.
“The war has lasted more than 200 days, the situation has become very difficult, I feel bad when I hear about deaths because I have always believed that war is the greatest of all madness,” he said.
Relations with Russia have been one of the themes of the electoral campaign, and today the Russian embassy in Italy re-entered the campaign, publishing photos of President Vladimir Putin with Italian politicians from all ideological fields on its social networks.
“From the recent history of relations between Italy and Russia. We have a lot to remember,” reads a message posted on Facebook, interpreted as a new interference in Italian politics three days before the September 25 elections.
The message contains photos of Putin with some Italian political leaders over the years: Matteo Salvini (League), Giuseppe Conte (M5S), Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, Silvio Berlusconi, who has always declared himself a friend of the Russian president, but also from the leader of the Democratic Party (PD) and former Prime Minister Enrico Letta.
The list continues with images of Putin with the heads of state Sergio Mattarella and Giorgio Napolitano and with the former head of government Matteo Renzi, as well as with the current EU Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni.
Source: TSF
