Rome and Moscow in spat over interpretation of history

 ROME — A spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry has accused Italy’s president of “spreading blasphemous lies” after Sergio Mattarella drew a comparison between President Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the behaviour of Hitler’s Third Reich.

 Maria Zakharova pointed out that Italy had joined Hitler in his invasion of Russia in 1941 and accused it of joining Nato now in “strengthening the terrorist neonazi regime in Kyiv with deadly modern weapons, unconditionally supporting the criminal regime in all its crimes”.

 Zakharova’s attack came nine days after Mattarella had delivered his speech to university students in Marseille, where he was accepting an honorary degree. She rounded it off by describing his remarks as an insult to the memory of Italian antifascists “and of all those who know history and don’t accept these criminal analogies, which are inappropriate and unacceptable”.

 In reality the president’s remarks were his usual thoughtful and principled defence of international law and the institutions that have upheld it since World War II, and which was violated when Putin invaded a neighbouring sovereign nation on February 24 2022. It sought parallels with what was happening in the world today and didn’t gloss over the errors of the past.

 The economic crisis of 1929 was followed by protectionism and the erosion of alliances — just as we see with the Trump presidency — and authoritarianism prevailed in countries “attracted by the fable that despotic and illiberal regimes were more effective in defending national interests”. The idea of domination, rather than cooperation, came to the fore, Mattarella said, recalling how Germany, Japan and Italy all withdrew from the League of Nations in the course of the 1930s.

 “And there were wars of conquest. This was the project of the Third Reich in Europe. Today’s Russian aggression against Ukraine is of this nature,” he said.

 The Italian president warned that Europe now risked being crushed between competing oligarchies and autocracies unless it became the protagonist of its own defence. “Europe finds itself at a crossroads,” he said, “divided as it is between smaller states and states that haven’t yet understood that they too are small in the face of the new world reality.”

 With the exception of Matteo Salvini’s League, which flirted with Putin’s United Russia party and is now currying favour with Trump, Italian leaders were quick to leap to the defence of their president. Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, said Zakharova’s words “offended the whole Italian nation” and expressed her support for Mattarella, who “had always been firm in his condemnation of the aggression against Ukraine”.

 Not all the Italian media has been supportive of the president, however. Il Fatto Quotidiano, frequently sympathetic to the Russian cause, published a lengthy interview with the communist historian Luciano Canfora, who proceeded to demolish a number of statements that Mattarella had not in fact made.

 The paper’s editor, Marco Travaglio, also waded into the controversy, saying it was inappropriate for the president of a country that had been the principal ally of the nazis to compare Russia to the Third Reich, “in the sense that Russia contributed 28 million dead to the defeat of naziism”.

 Mattarella has never spared his criticisms of Italy’s fascist history and his pairing of the two “wars of conquest” is apt.

 Italy’s Putin apologists blame Nato for provoking Russia into its invasion and castigate Eastern European leaders closer to the front line for “Russophobia”. The arm-chair pundits observing from the Mediterranean have no experience of life under Soviet rule or how an episode like the Katyn massacre in 1940, in which Soviet troops executed more than 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals, can condition a national psyche.

 “Since taking office as president in 2000… Mr Putin has mounted a determined campaign to assassinate opponents at home and abroad, incarcerate critics, invade neighbouring states, subvert elections overseas, harass and terrorise civil society, and form alliances with despotisms worldwide,” The Times commented in an editorial. It was “preposterous to suppose that he has been forced into policies of repression and revanchism by Nato policies,” it added.

 Putin’s rise to the head of an oligarchic kleptocracy has been scrupulously chronicled by the British journalist Catherine Belton in her book “Putin’s People”, which describes how foreign policy is conducted with the aid of gigantic KGB slush funds and domestic control maintained by the defenestration, literal and metaphorical, of oligarchs who fall out with the regime.

 Dealings with Ukraine before the war included the dioxin poisoning of western oriented presidential candidate Victor Yuschenko and efforts to suborn the Ukrainian government through kickbacks on favourable gas deals.

 An article published by the RIA Novosti news agency anticipating a swift Russian victory at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022 outlined Putin’s war aims: “Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has opened a new era,” the article, which was briefly published in error, stated. “Ukraine has returned to Russia. This does not mean that its statehood will be liquidated but it will be reorganised, re-established and returned to its natural state as part of the Russian world.”

 It is not reassuring to recall that as President Trump sets about negotiating an end to the war his early business career was orbited, according to Belton, by “Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organised crime associates,” who helped him out when he ran into financial difficulties.

 It might explain his government’s apparent preference for Putin over lily-livered European democrats. Fortunately, the Teflon Don appears wholly immune to scandal.

 In contrast to Trump’s America First policy, which may exclude Europe from the peace negotiations, Mattarella expressed the, perhaps forlorn, hope that multilateralism and solidarity would dictate the future of the French students’ world.

 ppw