Intelligence services reveal a senior Russian official contacted an adviser to League leader Salvini to ask if his ministers were “willing to resign”
Italy’s election campaign for the September 25 elections kicks off with a political earthquake as the affair of relations between League leader Matteo Salvini and Putin’s Russia explodes, with new elements leaving disturbing shadows behind the fall of the government – Draghi. The information bomb was launched by the newspaper ‘La Stampa’, which has seen documents from the intelligence services, according to which at the end of May a key official of the Russian embassy in Rome, Oleg Kostyukov, was an envoy of Salvini, his adviser for international relations, Antonio Capuano. if the League’s three ministers in the executive branch were “willing to resign from the Draghi government” to substantially drop it, thus demonstrating Moscow’s actual interest in the “destabilization” of Italy, underlines the newspaper.
The Turin daily reconstructs the League’s repeated contacts with Russian diplomats and politicians in the days of late June, amid the political crisis that eventually led the President of the Republic Mattarella to dissolve the Chambers less than a month later , exactly on July 21.
All Italian media in those days of League contacts with Russian diplomats and politicians covered the offensive of Salvini and the Five Star Movement against Draghi, with a public and parliamentary opinion campaign against sending weapons to Ukraine. Senators from the M5E came to work out a parliamentary resolution to prevent weapons from being sent to Kiev, leading to a split within the movement. In those circumstances, with tension and strife 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 of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and today Salvini’s adviser, a very serious matter in which, according to the Turin newspaper, the intelligence services see a Russian interest in destabilizing of the government: “The diplomat, showing the possible Russian interest in destabilizing the Italian government’s balance with this operation, is said to have asked whether the League’s ministers were prepared to propose their resignation from the government.”
The revelations of ‘La Stampa’, a respected newspaper of the Gedi Group, which includes ‘La Repubblica’ and a dozen regional newspapers, have raised great concern among all political parties, who are asking Salvini for clarification in Parliament. The League leader has minimized the information, saying it is “nonsense” and that his party is “an ally of Western countries, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t want good relations with Putin”. The head of intelligence, Franco Gabrielli, for his part, has denied the information, but “La Stampa” has confirmed it.
In light of the revelations, these words of Draghi in his last speech to the Senate on July 20, a significant date in the fall of the government, when the League and the Five Star Movement refrained from trusting the prime minister: foreign policy, we have seen attempts to weaken government 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 at the time he bought the plane tickets for a visit from Salvini on a “peace mission” to Moscow, a trip that caused a scandal and was eventually cut short because it was surreal, inconvenient and very embarrassing for the government. Salvini’s plan was to travel to the Russian capital to meet important Russian personalities, in a peacekeeping mission in which he unsuccessfully tried 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. In preparing the trip to Moscow, the Russian diplomats also took a very special interest in the fate of the Italian government.
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 unveiled. It was inconceivable that a leader of a ruling party would organize a trip behind the back of the Italian institutions, without agreeing to the executive branch in which the League has three ministers. Very harsh were the comments of some political leaders. “Salvini is a threat to national security,” said Carlo Calenda, leader of Azione, a centrist party.
Russian activity in Italy, always very active, was closely monitored in the spring. They learned about the preparations for Salvini’s incredible trip to Moscow and the help he received from Russia. In early May, Antonio Capuano was contacted “by an exponent – the name of this woman is not mentioned – from Putin’s United Russia party, who, aware of the planned mission of the League leader, is said to have offered to support to grant Salvini’s advisor in organizing the trip. Capuano informed him that meetings with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, with lunch for 6 May, and with the Speaker of the Upper House of the Russian Federal Assembly, Valentina Matvienko , were already planned,” according to Secret Service sources quoted by ‘La Stampa’.
Salvini’s meeting with Matvienko is not casual or meaningless. She is an oligarch of great importance in the Kremlin and with interests in Italy. He owns an extraordinary estate on the Adriatic coast, in Pesaro (in the Marche region, in central Italy), with 26 hectares of land, 650 meters of coastline available and completely privatized, with a house of 774 square meters. Matvienko is one of the most powerful officials in the Kremlin, the one who signed the request for Russian troops abroad on February 23, 2022, that is, Russia’s entry into the war with the invasion of Ukraine. It is clear that Matvienko is subject to European Union sanctions. On May 19, Salvini had already “confidentially met 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 arise in light of the availability of the diplomat, who alone would have demanded an unknown but insurmountable condition.
In the end, the Russians promised Salvini a meeting with the powerful Foreign Minister Lavrov, the influential Matvienko and perhaps President Vladimir Putin. The League leader also tried to play a diplomatic card with the Vatican to bolster his planned peacekeeping mission to Moscow. Salvini, accompanied by his adviser Antonio Capuano, met the Secretary of State, the equivalent of Prime Minister, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, in the Vatican on May 27. The Vatican distanced itself from the operation.
Source: La Verdad
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