- Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has said he is beginning to believe the conversation with Putin is a “waste of time”.
- Draghi said he had begun to lose faith in talks with Moscow after mass killings were discovered in Bucha.
- He also warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal “is not to seek peace.”
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Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi expressed disappointment with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, saying he was beginning to believe it was “just a waste of time” to engage with his Moscow counterpart over the invasion of Ukraine.
“I’m starting to think these people are right when they say, ‘It’s useless to talk to him, it’s just a waste of time,'” Draghi told the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera.
Draghi spoke on a telephone conversation between him and Putin on March 30, saying the Russian leader had discussed the possibility of Italy buying Russian gas in rubles. It is said that the country imports 40% of its gas from Russia.
The prime minister said the two sides had agreed to speak again in the next few days.
“Then came the horror of Bucha,” Draghi said, referring to the Kyiv suburbs, where authorities uncovered mass killings of civilians after Russian forces left the area.
The prime minister said he believed French President Emmanuel Macron, who had tried to position himself at the forefront of the EU’s talks with Putin, was “right to try every possible way for dialogue”.
“But I have the impression that the horror of the war with its massacre, with what they did to children and women, is completely independent of the words and phone calls that are made,” Draghi continued.
“Until now, Putin’s goal has not been to seek peace, but to try to destroy the Ukrainian resistance, occupy the country and entrust it to a friendly government,” he added.
Asked if he shared the label of Bucha’s assassinations by President Joe Biden as “war crimes”, Draghi said: “What do we want to call Bucha’s horror, if not war crimes?”
However, the Italian prime minister said terms such as “genocide” and “war crimes” have “exact legal meaning”.
“There will be a way and time to check which words best correspond to the inhuman actions of the Russian army,” Draghi said.
Draghi, the former head of the EU’s central bank, was appointed prime minister in February 2021 after his predecessor, Giuseppe Conte, stepped down amid the COVID-19 pandemic and severe economic downturn.
In recent weeks, Draghi has sought to diversify gas imports from Italy through deals in Africa and encouraged European nations to unite and limit Russian gas prices.
“The market power that the European Union has over Moscow is a weapon that must be used,” he told Il Corriere della Sera. “Limiting the price of gas reduces the funding we give Russia every day.”
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