In a leaked audio clip published by an Italian news agency, the
former prime minister claimed that President Zelensky had embarked on an aggressive policy towards the regions in eastern Ukraine claimed by Russia.
The Ukrainians had inflicted around 6,000 casualties, a death toll that eventually forced President Putin to intervene, Mr Berlusconi told his political supporters, in remarks that were apparently meant to be confidential.
“
You know how the thing in Russia happened, right?” he told allies within his Forza Italia party,
imploring them not to make his comments public.
He claimed that Ukraine had “thrown to the devil” a peace accord agreed with the Donbas republics in 2014 “and started to attack the border with the two republics".
“Among the soldiers who were deployed, the republics suffered around five to six or seven thousand casualties.
Zelensky then came on the scene and he tripled the attacks on the two republics.”
The former premier claimed that President Putin only intervened under pressure from the Russian parliament and people.
“The war, instead of being a two-week operation, has become a war that will last for 200 years or more.”
The analysis was similar to remarks Mr Berlusconi made last month in which he claimed that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was intended simply to install “decent people” in Kyiv.
“The troops were supposed to enter, reach Kyiv in a week, replace the Zelensky government with decent people and then come back after a week,” he told an Italian television programme.
“Instead, they encountered an unexpected level of resistance which was then fed by the supply of weapons of all kinds from the West.”
) that two suspects have been identified as “citizens of a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).”
