“An Italian soldier will never die in the name of Macron, that’s what I think,” said Salvini, leader of the far-right League party, which is part of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government coalition, cited by the Italian agency ANSA.
Macron reaffirmed in an interview with the British magazine The Economist, released today, that the sending of Western troops to Ukraine cannot be ruled out, as he had already said in February.
“If the Russians crossed the front line, if there was a Ukrainian request – which is not the case currently – we should legitimately ask ourselves the question,” said the French President.
For Macron, excluding such a hypothesis ‘a priori’ would mean not having learned “the lessons of the last two years”, when NATO countries refused to send tanks and planes to Ukraine, before changing their minds.
In a reaction to Salvini’s position, MEP Sandro Gozi, general secretary of the European Democratic Party, accused the League leader of being the true spokesman for the Kremlin (Russian presidency).
“The first immediate response to the French President’s words did not come from the official spokesperson of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, but from the real spokesperson of the Kremlin in Europe, Matteo Salvini,” he stated.
Gozi, elected by Macron’s Renaissance party, said that “Salvini has always been very clear about [ao Presidente russo Vladimir] Putin and the war in Ukraine.”
“There is no strategic ambiguity: he chose the side he wants to be on, that of Putin and Russia, obviously,” he added.
Gozi accompanied the comments on social media with a well-known photograph of Salvini on Red Square in Moscow, wearing a t-shirt with Putin’s face.
Salvini has in the past declared his admiration for Putin, but condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24, 2022.
More recently, Salvini called on Kiev to negotiate with the Russians.
