2024-05-13 08:37:06
In 2013, Vladimir Putin invited former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to Russia for hunting. When he returned, he shared the learnings of the trip with his spokesman Paolo Bonaiuti and the leader of the Forza Italia party in the Chamber of Deputies, Fabrizo Cicchitto. Just a few days ago, he described to journalists from the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera the disturbing course of the meeting between the two leaders and their long-standing friendship.
In an interview, Cicchitto described Berlusconi’s visit to Russia as a moment that “shaked his certainties”. According to the interviewed politician, Putin was supposed to reveal his violent nature to the prime minister during the meeting. “The ex-prime minister considered Putin a kind and reasonable person, in whom he could not imagine anything like that,” the Kyiv Post reports.
The late Berlusconi, who often boasted of his intimate friendship with the Russian president last year, had no idea what kind of reception awaited him. “Putin said to me: ‘Silvio, let’s go hunting.’ I thought, ‘Hunting? I’ve never even touched a rifle.’ But he insisted, so I accompanied him,” Berlusconi was said to have confided in an interview to close associates.
When the pair of men reached the forest, Putin handed Berlusconi a gun. Immediately, according to Cicchitto, anxiety set in. “As they walked through the snow, the Kremlin chief is said to have spotted two deer and instructed Berlusconi to target one, saying: ‘This one is yours. Shoot,” says the former deputy.
Berlusconi should have made it clear that he cannot kill an animal. “Even if I had to die, I wouldn’t shoot,” he allegedly told Putin moments before the Russian president shot both deer. “Then he looked at him with satisfaction and said that he would offer him an extraordinary meal that day. He went down the slope to the corpses and held a knife in his hand. He cut open one of the animals and took out its heart,” Cicchitto continues.
He then ordered one of the men from his private security team to hand him a wooden tray on which he placed the organ. “Berlusconi almost had a stroke. He told us he hid behind a tree and vomited,” added the politician in an interview with the Italian press. After the ex-prime minister confided the story to his colleagues, according to Cicchitto, an endless silence spread. Only Berlusconi himself broke him, when he commented on the situation saying that maybe it was just a hunting habit.
The bond between leaders
Journalists also asked Cicchitta, who was one of Berlusconi’s closest political associates, about the nature of Berlusconi’s friendship with Putin. He described it as “the bond of psychological homosexuality”.
Putin considered the businessman, who effectively controlled television broadcasting in Italy and was able to penetrate politics thanks to it, to be a genius. Berlusconi saw Putin as a pragmatist who can manage a huge country and with whom many things can be solved – from trade to women. Silvio had the ambition to bring him to the West and to the North Atlantic Alliance. “He said about himself that he would go down in history because of this. He thought he would win, but instead Putin tripped him up,” claims Cicchitta.
Cicchitto, along with Berlusconi, estimated that Putin plans to expand his sphere of influence. “He used Berlusconi and his connections with the Americans to get back among the big players who resented Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Berlusconi felt he could influence Putin, especially after he helped tame the Russian leader after the 2008 invasion of Georgia.” explains.
The Italian prime minister does not approve of the invasion, he also criticizes Zelensky
The start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should mean a big disappointment for Berlusconi from Russia and his former friend Putin. “But he was also angry at Zelensky, whom he defined as a megalomaniac actor, dangerous to himself and others,” explains the ex-deputy.
Shortly before his death last June, Berlusconi publicly said he understood Putin’s drive to replace the Ukrainian president with “decent people” and accused Zelensky of being a war-monger.
“I learned by hearsay that Berlusconi declared before his death that he would never vote for Ukraine’s entry into the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance. In the last years of his life, however, we rarely talked,” describes Cicchitto. He was troubled by the feeling that Berlusconi did not know Putin’s cultural background at all, which was shaped by personalities such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible or Joseph Stalin. “Each of these figures had a very strong authoritarian component, associated not with the restoration of the Soviet Union, but with the myth of Great Russia,” he said.
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