From Conte to Dibba, among the grillini there are Putin’s true friends

“Salvini clarifies in the appropriate forums,” says Giuseppe Conte about the revelations of La Stampa on the meetings between an official of the Russian embassy and Matteo Salvini’s adviser Antonio Capuano. But if there is a political leader who should at least blush when it comes to intertwining with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, that is Conte. Not only for the endorsement received last June by the Moscow ambassador Sergey Razov about the no to arms in Kiev, but above all because he is the head of a party that has always been in the front row flirting with Putin. On the other hand, it was the M5s that brought a large patrol of pro-Russians, more or less repentant, to Parliament.

Manlio Di Stefano, now undersecretary of the Farnesina of undoubted Atlanticist faith, falls into the category of repentants. Well, only a few years ago Luigi Di Maio’s right-hand man was the leader of Italian-style Putinism. The former grillino, in June 2015, in the Chamber of Deputies spoke thus of the pro-European riots of 2014 in Kiev: “A coup d’état financed by Europe and the US”. Today his words about a Ukrainian government headed by “staunch neo-Nazis” are particularly sinister. And again, again Di Stefano two years later was the protagonist of an expedition to Moscow to participate in the congress of United Russia, Putin’s party. With him was another former grillino, such as Di Stefano at the time deputy of the M5s. We are talking about Alessandro Di Battista, vying for a place on the list in the next elections, a pro-Russian far from repentant. Dibba, in fact, has just returned home from a trip to “deep Russia”, with the aim of investigating the arguments of the Ukrainian aggressors and putting them on paper for Il Fatto Quotidiano. On the net there are still photos of Di Battista and Di Stefano smiling next to Putin’s two loyalists Robert Shlegel and Sergey Zheleznyak. And it must be said that only two years had passed since the Russian annexation of Crimea and the consequent sanctions against the Kremlin. Retaliation to which the M5s has always said it is against, also through the mouth of the former political leader Di Maio. In the M5s no one escapes flirtation with Moscow. Not even the “moderate” Chiara Appendino, who as mayor of Turin was a regular at the Economic Forum of St. Petersburg, the international showcase of the Russian regime.

Pure Conte must ask himself about his recent past as prime minister. A past in which he praised “his friend Putin” and agreed with him for the controversial mission of the Russian military in the Covid-torn Bergamo. And then there is Beppe Grillo, who in 2017 in an interview with the French weekly Journal du Dimanche noted: “International politics needs strong men like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin”. Returning to the most topical, it is no coincidence that among the candidates for candidates for politics in the lists of pentastellati there are names like those of Alessandro Orsini and Michele Santoro. Both opposed to military aid to Ukraine and accused of pro-Putinism. Finally Vito Petrocelli, the former grillino expelled from the presidency of the Senate Foreign Commission for his positions close to the Kremlin. He too elected with the M5s. Like Senator Bianca Laura Granato, one who after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine said that “Putin is fighting a battle for all of us”.

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