A series of events accused of spreading Russian propaganda in Italy have caused a row in the country, with the Ukrainian embassy urging local authorities to cancel them.
In the coming weeks, several conferences featuring Russian propagandists are scheduled to take place throughout Italy, one of which includes the far-right Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin, whose views helped shape the ideas behind the Ukraine invasion. Another “conference-exhibition” in Modena, in the Emilia-Romagna region, focuses on the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol and is titled The Rebirth of Mariupol.
The website of the association Russia Emilia Romagna, which organised the event, describes Mariupol, which was the scene of a Russian siege that the Red Cross called “apocalyptic”, as a “symbolic city of the popular uprising in Donbas against Kyiv, now facing a rapid reconstruction process under the auspices of the Russian Federation, of which it has become an integral part”.
The Ukrainian embassy in Rome wrote on Facebook that “the ministry of foreign affairs of Ukraine considers this event a Russian provocation”, adding it had already sent an official request to cancel the event.
“Officially, Italy firmly supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. We expect an appropriate reaction to this Russian provocation,” said Oleh Nikolenko, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian foreign ministry, quoted in the embassy’s post.
After pressure from public opinion, the mayor of Modena, Gian Carlo Muzzarelli, announced he would revoke the association’s permission to use the venue. He cited the promoters’ statements, which made it clear that the initiative could “become an open show of support for Russia’s invasion war, contradicting the promotion of values such as justice, freedom, democracy, and peace”.
The event, organised by a former member of the far-right League party, is also set to feature Russia’s consul general in Italy, Dmitry Shtodin.
The Russia Emilia Romagna association responded with a press release describing the decision to revoke permission to use the venue as “a blatant violation of municipal regulations and an attack on the principles enshrined in the constitution of the Italian Republic, which establish the right to freely express one’s thoughts through speech, writing, and any other means of dissemination”. It said it would attempt to find another venue.
Another conference scheduled for 27 January in Lucca, Tuscany, titled Towards a New Multipolar World, will host Dugin, one of Vladimir Putin’s closest ideologues and a supporter of the war against Ukraine, whose daughter was killed in a car bomb on the outskirts of Moscow in August 2022.
The organiser of the event is Lorenzo Berti, a former member of the Italian neo-fascist movement CasaPound. When contacted by the news agency Adnkronos, Berti dismissed the controversy as “ridiculous”. He said the conference was not about Dugin or the war in Ukraine but about the multipolar world, and Dugin had been invited as one of the leading scholars of geopolitics internationally. Following the controversy, the Best Western hotel chain has denied the use of one of its conference rooms to host the event. Organisers are now looking for another venue.
In Bologna, there is controversy surrounding a documentary accused of spreading Russian propaganda, with the mayor of the city blocking the screening, while, in Latina, in the Lazio region, high school students have taken part in a project that involved virtual dialogues with students from the Beregovoy high school in Luhansk, Ukraine, which is occupied by Russian forces.
“We need to increase our attention regarding these phenomena and dynamics, all the more so as we approach the European elections, which represent for Putin a functional junction for the destabilisation of our democracies,” wrote Pina Picierno, a vice-president of the European parliament and member of the Democratic party.
Although Italy’s far-right government is one of Ukraine’s staunchest European supporters, Russian propaganda and disinformation permeates Italian media – something researchers attribute to politics and historical anti-Atlanticism – with openly pro-Russian guests invited on to the country’s most popular talkshows.
Last year, Matteo Pugliese, an Italian security and terrorism researcher at the University of Barcelona, tracked the procession of Russian government officials, ideologues and media personalities hosted by Italian TV networks since the Russian invasion. They included the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and his spokesperson, Maria Zakharova; Olga Belova, a journalist at Russia-24, an outlet that denied the Bucha massacre; and Yulia Vityazeva, a journalist at NewsFront – based in Russia-occupied Crimea and operated by the Russian federal security service – who, in a Telegram post, wished a bomb would strike the Eurovision song contest in Turin after Ukraine’s victory.
In 2022, Italy’s parliamentary committee for security, Copasir, launched an investigation amid widespread concern about Kremlin-linked Russian commentators appearing on Italian news channels, as several Ukrainian journalists refused to accept invitations to Italian TV shows.
“Since 2014 … state TV and private channels, especially Silvio Berlusconi’s channels, a close friend of Putin, have told the Italians the false narrative of a Nazi coup in Ukraine that led to a ‘civil war’”, said Vladislav Maistrouk, a Ukrainian journalist raised in Italy. “After the Russian bombings in Mariupol, the massacres in Bucha, Italians’ perception of the war in Ukraine by Russia was turned upside down, and Russian propaganda lost many ‘friends’.
“However, Russian propaganda continues to contaminate the Italian media through editorial politics or opportunism, turning the war into a show where previously unimaginable alliances, between far-right and far-left figures, defend Russia and blame the west for the deaths of Ukrainians and for Russophobia.”
According to a Pew Research Center survey released in July, Italy is among the countries in the EU where people have the lowest confidence in Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president. According to the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, Italians were the most sympathetic to Russia of member states polled, with 27% blaming Ukraine and the US for the war.
