2023-08-12 16:00:34
At the end of May 2022, that is, just over one my before the fall of Government of Italy chaired by Mario Draghi, Oleg Kostiukovfirst secretary of the embassy of Russia in Rome, and Anthony Capuanoadviser on issues of international relations of Matthew Salvini, the leader of the League, held a meeting. According to intelligence documents released by the Turin newspaper The printthe Russian diplomat asked the far-right politician if his political formation was “willing” to withdraw his ministers from an Executive that, after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukrainehad endorsed without fissures sanctions against Moscow and had accepted send weapons to the attacked Slavic country. The spread of the conversation caused a major scandal in the transalpine country before the possibility that Moscow had played a role in the end of the Draghi stage. The controversy escalated when it was learned that the Russian official present at that meeting was nothing more and nothing less than the son of Igor Kostiukovdirector of Central Intelligence Departmentbetter known as GRU, the military intelligence agency.
“Italia is one of the great countries of Europe most infiltrated by Russia,” the investigative journalist told EL PERIÓDICO James James. The windows through which interference enters and the disinformation of the Kremlin are multiple, and includes parties, both from the right and from the left, public and private media, and political leaders, such as the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconithe ultra Matthew Salvini or the populist Beppe Grillo, who do not hide their affinity for Moscow. There are also historical reasons. “During the Cold War, Italy was the country in the West that had the most important communist party,” a formation where the “anti-American” sentiment was “very powerful,” Iacoboni details.
Own Alexander of Baptista, a speaker this year at Rototom Sunsplash, starred in a well-known and controversial episode of possible Russian interference in the politics of the transalpine country. The book Supernovawritten by Nicholas Biondo y Marco Canestratiexplains the secrets of the populist formation 5 Star Movement. Its pages are attributed to the former grillista deputy a controversial phrase referring to the referendum to amend the Constitution proposed by the then center-left prime minister Matthew Renzi, -proposal to which his party was opposed- pronounced in 2016 in the same offices of the parliamentary group: “How about getting a hand from the Russian ambassador in the campaign on the constitutional referendum? After all we are doing for them… .”.
Director pro-Kremlin
In 2018, during the Government shared by The league far-right and populist 5 Star Movementwas appointed as director of RAI Marcello Foa, a man considered close to the Kremlin theses, who has spent a large part of his professional career at ‘Il Giornale’, a Berlusconi family newspaper. His affinity with Moscow is such that he even dared to go to the RT microphones then, channel banned today in the EU, to criticize the decision of the president Sergio Mattarella to veto a Eurosceptic as Economy Minister at that time.
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Mediaset, Berlusconi’s television group, has invited commentators accused of spreading unverified narratives of the Kremlin, and even Russian commentators close to the state led by Vladimir Putin. In 2022, he published the first interview given by the Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov to a European medium after the start of the invasion, where he denied Russian responsibility for the Bucha massacre and insisted on the version that Ukraine was governed by Nazis. When asked about the Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenskiof the Hebrew religion, replied that even Hitler “he also had Jewish blood”, drawing a torrent of criticism.
All these continuous incidents have motivated the Intelligence Commission of the Italian Parliament initiate an investigation to detail the scope of disinformation in the transalpine country.
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