Italy? “She has always been close to us,” he says Vladimir Putin. “I remember how I was welcomed by you, I always felt at home”. The Russian president responds to a young Italian student at Mgimo in Moscow, the state university for international relations under the aegis of the Russian Foreign Ministry. She the girl told Putin that she had fallen in love with Russia, to which he replied: “And that’s it? Hasn’t she fallen in love with anyone else?”. To the young woman’s embarrassment, the Russian president added: “Strange that a beautiful girl like her hasn’t fallen in love yet.” Then he took the opportunity to talk about her relationship with Italy. And not only. The Tsar wanted to underline that in general in the “so-called hostile” countries Russia has “many allies”, a “security network” that has proven to be “wide and reliable” in the name of the defense of “traditional values”. With a targeted propaganda passage: “The tasks that the wicked had set for themselves in terms of isolating Russia have fallen apart” in fact now “they talk about it less and less”.
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The occasion for the conversation is given by the forum of the Russian Strategic Initiatives Agency, entitled ‘Strong ideas for a new time’. The agency Ria Novosti he explained that the Italian girl who spoke with Putin would be Irene Cecchini. In the videos that have been circulating, she is heard declaring that she is originally from “the Milan region”. “It’s a beautiful place, an industrialized region of Italy,” was Putin’s comment reported by the Russian agency. “Italy is a true province of work,” the president would later add. Last June, Cecchini spoke about herself on the Mgimo university web portal: her classical studies in Italy, her choice of the Russian university (“a prestigious university that provides an excellent education in international relations and foreign languages”) where this point should attend the fourth year. And then her impressions of Russia: “My expectations were initially based on the information disseminated by the media and on the opinion of the people in my country of origin, but – she added – it was a unilateral vision that I wanted to explore further”. And now, however, Cecchini reports a reality that is “warm, welcoming and eager to share its culture and tradition even with foreigners” and of a population with a “strong sense of community and enthusiasm for mutual help”.