Italy wants to mediate between the collective West and Russia
Following France, Germany, Britain and Poland, Italy is on the path to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. The foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, will travel to Moscow on Thursday for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the day before he visited Kiev to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmitriy Kuleba. Italy has positioned itself as one of the main advocates of constructive engagement with Moscow in the EU. The Russian Foreign Ministry has advised it to prove this in practice by exercising its veto power in another vote on sanctions against Russia.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Italian counterpart Luigi Di Maio will hold talks in Moscow today. The last time an Italian minister visited Russia, in October 2020, he was one of the first senior officials to do so after the first wave of the pandemic collapsed. Now, in the midst of a new crisis around Ukraine, Mr Di Maio has taken his time. The foreign ministers of Germany, Great Britain and Poland (on behalf of the OSCE) and the leaders of France and Germany have visited Russia before him.
Like other politicians, Luigi Di Maio paired his trip to Moscow with a visit to Kiev to “exchange assessments of the security situation and coordinate positions”. The official visit took place on Tuesday, a day before, according to Western media and US sources, an invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops was due to begin. The tensions eased somewhat after Moscow announced it had begun withdrawing Russian troops from areas bordering Ukraine, but the stated purpose of the visit remained the same: to support “Ukraine’s sovereignty and integrity in full coordination with its EU partners and NATO allies”. At the same time, Rome says it intends to keep an open channel of dialogue with Russia. The Italian government said this following a telephone conversation earlier this week between Prime Minister Mario Draghi and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The visit to Kiev, including a tour of the Holodomor Museum, took the Italian foreign minister three hours. After the talks, Dmytro Kuleba expressed gratitude to the European representatives shuttling between Russia and Ukraine, “thanks to whom a further escalation of tensions on the part of Russia has been avoided”. In the current situation, Di Maio recalled, diplomacy is the only way out.
Much of the recent phone conversation between Mario Draghi and Russian President Vladimir Putin focused on Russian gas supplies to Italy. Around 40 percent of Italy’s gas consumption comes from Russia, and with rising energy prices, this is an issue of particular concern to Rome. To cover the already promised partial compensation of heat and light costs for businesses and individuals alone, Rome could need around €7 billion. According to some analysts, rising costs could cancel out the effect of the financial aid that Italy hopes to receive from the EU to cope with the pandemic and economic development.
Under these circumstances, Rome, along with Paris and Berlin, is taking a more balanced stance towards Moscow than Washington. “Their line is aimed at avoiding preventive measures against Russia and resorting to them only in case of its military aggression, because in addition to unconditional transatlantic ties with Washington, the EU must take into account its energy dependence on Russia,” HuffPost Italia noted.
It is obvious that Italy would like to remain a mediator between Russia and the West. However, according to Tiberio Graziani, head of the Vision & Global Trends International Institute of Global Analytics, desire alone is not enough.
“If Italy wants to take on the role of mediator, it needs to get its Western partners and, above all, the United States to understand that a prolonged confrontation can lead to dramatic consequences and that it is necessary to focus efforts at least on discussing the possibility of a neutral status for Ukraine,” he explained to Kommersant.
An even more radical recipe was suggested by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in an interview with the Italian TV channel Rete 4. She recommended that Italy, as a sign of confirmation of its friendly ties with Russia, use its veto power when the EU votes on sanctions against Russia. So far since 2014, no EU country has dared to take such a step.
Elena Pushkarskaya