Draghi, moments before presenting his dimisión. /
Intelligence services reveal that a senior Russian official contacted an adviser to Salvini, leader of the League, to ask if his ministers “were willing to resign”
The Italian electoral campaign for the September 25 elections begins with a political earthquake as the case of relations between the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, and Putin’s Russia explodes, with new elements that leave disturbing shadows behind the fall of the Draghi government. The information bomb has been launched by the newspaper ‘La Stampa’, which has viewed documents from the intelligence services, according to which, at the end of May, an important official from the Russian embassy in Rome, Oleg Kostyukov, asked an emissary of Salvini, his adviser for international relations, Antonio Capuano, if the three ministers of the League in the Executive were “willing to resign from the Draghi Government” to substantially drop it, demonstrating a factual interest of Moscow in the ‘destabilization’ from Italy, underlines the newspaper.
The Turin daily reconstructs the repeated contacts of the League with Russian diplomats and politicians in the days of the end of June, in the midst of the political crisis that finally led the President of the Republic Mattarella to dissolve the Chambers, less than a month later, exactly on July 21.
All the Italian media highlighted, in those days of League contacts with Russian diplomats and politicians, the offensive launched by Salvini and the 5-Star Movement against Draghi, with a public and parliamentary opinion campaign against sending arms to Ukraine. Senators of the M5E even elaborated a parliamentary resolution to prevent arms from being sent to kyiv, which led to creating a split within the Movement. In those circumstances, with tension and fight in the Government, where the League and the M5E acted as if they had one foot inside and one outside the Executive, the senior Russian diplomat, Oleg Kostyukov, «vicar of the political office of the Russian embassy in Rome”, he came to ask Antonio Capuano, a former Neapolitan deputy for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and today Salvini’s advisor, a very serious issue, in which, according to the Turin newspaper, the intelligence services see a Russian interest in destabilizing the Government: “The diplomat, showing the possible Russian interest in destabilizing the balance of the Italian Government with this operation, would have asked if the League ministers were willing to propose their resignations from the Government.”
Salvini: “It’s nonsense”
The revelations of ‘La Stampa’, a respected newspaper of the Gedi Group, of which ‘La Repubblica’ and a dozen regional newspapers are part, have caused deep concern in all the political parties, which are asking Salvini for an explanation in Parliament. The leader of the League has minimized the information, indicating that it is “nonsense” and that his party “is an ally of Western countries, which does not mean that he does not want good relations with Putin.” For his part, the head of the intelligence services, Franco Gabrielli, has denied the information, but ‘La Stampa’ has confirmed it.
In light of the revelations, these words by Draghi in his last speech in the Senate, on July 20, a key date in the fall of the Government, when the League and the 5-Star Movement abstained in confidence in the Prime Minister: “In foreign policy, we have seen attempts to weaken the government’s support for Ukraine, to weaken our opposition to President Putin’s plan.”
The name of the diplomat Kostyukov is known in the Italian media because he bought the plane tickets in those days for a visit by Salvini on a “peace mission” to Moscow, a trip that caused a scandal and that in the end was aborted because it was surreal, inopportune and very embarrassing for the government. Salvini’s plan was to travel to the Russian capital to meet with important Russian personalities, in a peace mission in which he tried in vain to involve the Vatican. Salvini arranged everything with the Russian ambassador in Rome, Sergei Razov, with several visits to the diplomatic delegation, without informing Mario Draghi. While preparing for the trip to Moscow, the Russian diplomats also took a very special interest in the fate of the Italian Government.
The diplomat Oleg Kostyukov paid for the tickets for the trip scheduled for May 29, an expense that was later reimbursed by the League when the operation was revealed. It was inconceivable that a leader of a government party would organize a trip behind the back of the Italian institutions, without agreeing with the Executive in which the League has three ministers. Very harsh were the comments of some political leaders. “Salvini is a danger to national security,” said Carlo Calenda, leader of Azione, a centrist party.
Russian monitoring
Russian activity in Italy, always very active, was closely monitored during the spring. They were able to learn about the preparations for Salvini’s incredible trip to Moscow and about the help he was receiving from Russia. At the beginning of May, Antonio Capuano was contacted “by an exponent – this woman’s name is not mentioned – of Putin’s party, United Russia, who, informed of the mission planned by the leader of the League, would have offered to support Salvini’s adviser in organizing the trip. Capuano informed him that meetings with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, with a lunch for May 6, and with the president of the Upper House of the Russian Federal Assembly, Valentina Matvienko, were already scheduled, “according to the sources of the secret services quoted by ‘La Stampa’.
Salvini’s meeting with Matvienko is not casual or of little substance. She is an oligarch of great weight in the Kremlin and with interests in Italy. She owns an extraordinary property on the Adriatic coast, in Pesaro (in the Marche region, in central Italy), with 26 hectares of land, 650 meters of coastline available and fully privatized, with a house of 774 square meters. Matvienko is one of the most powerful officials in the Kremlin, the one who on February 23, 2022 signed the request for Russian troops abroad, that is, the entry of Russia into the war with the invasion of Ukraine. Obviously, Matvienko is under the sanctions of the European Union. On May 19, Salvini had already met “confidentially with the Russian ambassador, with whom he would also discuss the Pope’s possible trip to Russia, as he glimpsed the possibility that it could materialize in light of the availability of the diplomat, who would only have demanded an unidentified but surmountable condition.
Ultimately, the Russians promised Salvini to meet the powerful Foreign Minister Lavrov, the influential Matvienko and, perhaps, President Vladimir Putin. The leader of the League also tried to play a diplomatic card with the Vatican, to reinforce his projected peace mission to Moscow. Salvini, accompanied by his adviser Antonio Capuano, met on May 27, at the Vatican, with the Secretary of State, the equivalent of Prime Minister, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. The Vatican disassociated itself from the operation.