Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky on Friday invited Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to visit Ukraine during a telephone conversation in which the leader of Brothers of Italy renewed her support for Kiev.
Meloni has conveyed to Zelenski her wish for the renewal of the agreement on grain exports signed with Russia, mediated by Turkey and the United Nations, while expressing Italy’s support for Kiev «within the framework of international alliances on the political, military, economic or humanitarian fronts».
The far-right woman also said during the call to be «proud of the great solidarity shown by the Italian people towards the Ukrainian citizens welcomed in the country», as reported by the AdnKronos news agency.
For his part, the Ukrainian President informed Meloni, with whom he last spoke on October 4, when the Italian Executive was not yet formed, of the military advances on Ukrainian territory.
«I congratulated Meloni on her appointment as prime minister of Italy. I am hopeful for more fruitful cooperation. We discussed Ukraine’s integration into the European Union and NATO,» the Ukrainian leader specified on his Twitter profile.
Zelenski also asked the Italian government, during an interview with the newspaper ‘Corriere della Sera’, for more air defense assistance, giving as an example the SAMP-T, a medium-range surface-to-air missile system.
The hitherto Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, had clearly shown his support for Kiev since the beginning of the war. Meloni has previously expressed himself in the same sense, and has strongly condemned Russia.
However, Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, the two political parties supporting Meloni, have the opposite opinion. Salvini had criticized the sanctions against Moscow and Berlusconi has been a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin for years.
Berlusconi has been at the center of several controversies in Italy in recent weeks following the leak of a set of audios in which he claimed that Putin is «a person of peace and good sense» with whom he even shared gifts recently. Other of his claims included that Zelenski had tripled attacks on the Donbas region since the signing of the Minsk agreement.
Berlusconi’s statements highlighted the closeness of the European extreme right with President Putin, while the far-right Meloni is trying to camouflage those pro-Russian postulates known among some of his associates, such as the new president of the Chamber of Deputies, Lorenzo Fontana.
