His words were leaked and those around him initially denied it, but an audio recording was then broadcast, shocking future Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is working to form a government with her coalition allies, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. and Matteo Salvini’s League.
“I reconnected with President Putin a little, a little a lot, in the sense that for my birthday, Putin sent me 20 bottles of vodka and a very nice letter. I responded by sending him bottles from Lambrusco and a very nice letter. He told me that I was the first of his five true friends,” continued the former Prime Minister, who celebrated his 86th birthday on September 29.
Hastily, Forza Italia issued a statement to clarify the position of the party and Berlusconi vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine, “in line with that of Europe and the United States”.
The leftist opposition went wild.
“It’s not folklore, it’s not jokes. The new majority is initiating a change in Italy’s trajectory towards an increasingly ambiguous position towards Russia”, denounced Enrico Letta, head of the Democratic Party. , on Twitter.
The – recurrent – statements of Mr. Berlusconi could weaken the position of Antonio Tajani, a close, pro-European, approached for Foreign Affairs.
Giorgia Meloni’s entourage tried to calm things down.
“I would avoid involving Tajani,” Francesco Lollobrigida, Fratelli d’Italia MP, said on Wednesday. “He was president of the European Parliament (…) and always defended the Western alliance” after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, he underlined.
But for other sources within Fratelli d’Italia, quoted by the daily La Stampa, “Berlusconi could have killed Tajani”.
During the election campaign, Berlusconi had already provoked outrage by claiming that Vladimir Putin had wanted to overthrow the kyiv government to put “good people” in its place.
In the rest of this audio recording, a new part of which leaked on Wednesday evening, Mr. Berlusconi seems to blame the war on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who, according to him, “has tripled the attacks” against the self-proclaimed republics of Donbass .
“In 2014 in Minsk, Belarus, an agreement was signed between Ukraine and the two newly formed republics in Donbass for a peace agreement and that no one attacks anyone. A year later, Ukraine throws this agreement and begins to attack the borders of the two republics”, tells Mr. Berlusconi to his elected officials.
He mentions “5-6-7 thousand dead” in these fights then “Zelensky arrives and triples the attacks against the two republics”, adds the tycoon, later taking up his remarks at the end of September according to which Putin was “pushed” by its population and its entourage to invade Ukraine.