The Berlusconi Tapes

Berlusconi’s long-lasting love affair with Vladimir Putin shocks exactly no one

They go way back. Putin gives Berlusconi a book titled The Silvio Berlusconi Effect during the prime minister’s visit to Sochi in 2002. Kremlin.ru, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Monique Camarra, Siena

On October 19, Italy’s LaPresse news agency published a leaked recording of Silvio Berlusconi speaking to members of his political party, Forza Italia. Here’s my translation:

On several occasions, the Russian ministers said that we’re already at war with them. Why? Because we give arms and financing to Ukraine.

I personally cannot express my opinion because if I do, then it will get to the press or others and a disaster would happen, but I’m very, very, very worried.

I have got back in touch a bit with Putin, quite a lot, actually, in the sense that for my birthday, he sent me twenty bottles of vodka and a very sweet letter. I responded with some bottles of Lambrusco and a letter that was just as sweet.

I was deemed by him the first among his five true friends.

The comments triggered outrage—particularly because Forza Italia is poised to be a member of Italy’s new coalition government—but not surprise.

The second recording, aired a day later, was even more repulsive than the first—again, not because Berlusconi’s intimacy with Putin was unknown to Italians, but because we were undeniably hearing the former prime minister—a man with relationships at the highest level in Europe and the world—sympathizing with and apologizing for a genocidal dictator. Berlusconi reveals that he lacks any familiarity with recent, well-documented historical events. He also lacks morals.

“You know what happened with Russia’s war?” he says.