There are two things happening in Europe at the same time, and they reinforce each other. The first is a wave of sabotage and mysterious attacks for which an explanation is demanded, except that the explanation is never actually sought — only a culprit is assigned. The second is a taboo, increasingly enforced, on speaking with Vladimir Putin or with anyone whose ideas and actions we do not share. Together these two habits are dragging Italy into a confrontation with Russia that serves no Italian interest whatsoever.
Start with the sabotage. The number of suspected sabotage operations in Europe nearly quadrupled between 2023 and 2024, to more than thirty, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. When something blows up, the honest first question is the simplest one: who benefits? Would it be Russia? Ukraine? Or someone else entirely? This is not a provocative question, it is the elementary question of any serious investigation. Yet it is barely asked in public, because the answer has already been written before the inquiry begins. And once the culprit is fixed in advance, the facts stop mattering — what matters is whether you nod along. Anyone who raises the question is not treated as a sceptic but as an accomplice.
That is how the second taboo operates. Refusing to talk to Putin is presented as a virtue, as if diplomacy were a reward for good behaviour rather than an instrument for protecting your own country. It is the purest form of guilt by association: if you sit at the same table as someone, you must secretly agree with him. By that logic, no negotiation, no ceasefire, no arms control agreement would ever have been possible in the history of the world. You negotiate precisely with people you do not like, because those are the people with whom there is something to negotiate.
Jeffrey Sachs made this point plainly: real diplomacy means meeting all the parties involved in a conflict, and the European Union has done the opposite, refusing dialogue with Putin and with Lavrov. That is not toughness. It is a grave error, and Europe is paying for it. Sachs has spent around thirty years working on Russia, meeting in person the leaders in the Kremlin, in Washington and elsewhere, and reporting what he saw and heard. He is dismissed by people who have never crossed a border and who cannot get past the slogan that there is an aggressor and an aggrieved — as though a phrase learned by heart were the same thing as a history lesson.
The same quality was on display in the conversation with Sachs and Massimo D'Alema. Two men who would fit, many times over, into the space that current European leadership leaves empty. What they offer is not softness towards Moscow but a different intellectual instrument: the recognition that we are living in a multipolar world, that no single bloc can dictate its terms, and that in such a world the country that keeps talking is the country that keeps its options. When Sachs debated the new multipolar order for two hours with students in New York, the room was full and hungry for it. The young have already moved into that world. European officialdom has not.
So the question must be put bluntly, without embarrassment: why exactly is the European Union trying to wage war against Russia? Not to defend Ukraine, not to deter, not to negotiate from strength — but to wage it, as a project in itself. Italy has no quarrel with Russia. Italians did not choose this confrontation and will not gain from it. They will pay for it in energy, where in 2024 industrial electricity prices were 11% above the euro-area average, according to the Italian energy regulator. They will pay for it in industry, where Italian exports to Russia fell from 7.7 billion euros in 2021 to 4.3 billion in 2024. And they will pay for it in freedom of speech at home, where even artists and athletes are now expected to pass a loyalty test on whom they are allowed to admire.
Italy should want two things, and say them loudly. First, that every act of sabotage be investigated honestly, with the question of interest asked before the verdict. Second, that the telephone be picked up. Talking is not capitulation. It is what sovereign countries do when they refuse to be passengers in someone else's confrontation.
Leave a Reply