«Today Putin said clearly that he doesn’t want peace, he doesn’t want to stop bombing in Ukraine. So at least even at the Italian level those who think it is easy to dialogue with Putin will realize that it is not easy.” The Minister of Defense, Guido Crosetto, said this on the sidelines of a conference organized by the Med-Or foundation at the Center for Higher Defense Studies. «Putin’s provocations – he added – are the order of the day. As long as he sends the troops to the border with Finland for the exercise it’s fine, but the problem is when he makes them go over the tanks like in Ukraine.”
«Defense and security in difficult times can have a high price – added the Minister of Defense -. We live in a world of shadows which for two years now has imposed a very rapid paradigm shift on us, which has forced us to become aware of the weakness of the defense organization as we had structured it: we no longer talked about deaths in Europe for decades, today there are hundreds of thousands”, continued the minister. «In recent decades they have talked about a defense and a world different from the one we find ourselves in and the first shadow to dispel is the one widespread in the country, that defense did not count and that it had no impact on our daily lives or on the economy» , added Crosetto.
The head of Defense, in his speech at the round table, also underlined that «Ukraine needs ammunition and tanks, not bureaucratic coalitions. We are giving ancient answers to completely different challenges, the ability of democracies to adapt is inadequate. Ukraine – continued Crosetto – expected from the West not words but things that would help it defend itself. The Western production machine and the financial one has slowed down in some way, words are useless in defending oneself. When the bombs fall on me, I either stop them or they fall on me, so I believe that the West has somehow underestimated the difficulty of supply and production, while instead the countries that have transformed their economy into a war economy like Russia they continue to produce much more than they produced before and much more than the West.”
«The next two years will be the darkest since the post-war period: there has never been such great chaos in the world order», the minister declared again: «NATO must open up to new partners: the numerical value is important and one of NATO’s objectives is not to be perceived as something that is against everything that is not NATO: this is precisely Russian disinformation, not only in Africa but also in India or Latin America.”