One hears so often that Italy is the soft underbelly of Europe when it comes to the spread of Russian disinformation and that this is also why we are, according to all polls, the softest country on issues such as support for Ukraine and rearmament.

It is true that here Putin’s cognitive warfare can count on veritable highways, thanks mainly to the complacency – or rather complicity – of well known propagandists and often entire newspapers, whose aim is to ensure that the propaganda is presented in good clothes, so that it has some hope of going unnoticed (or almost unnoticed).

It would be difficult to find another European country in which to write in one of the most prestigious geopolitical magazines, such as Limes, published by the GEDI group (which also publishes, to be clear, Repubblica, L’Espresso, theHuffington Post and owns radio stations such as Radio Deejay and Radio Capital) and directed by the ubiquitous Lucio Caracciolo, which even hosts among its editors a person who is sanctioned for supporting the invasion of Ukraine.

Just two days ago, an article appeared in the online version of the newspaper entitled ‘EUROPE DON’T FEAR, RUSSIA WILL NOT EAT YOU!’, signed by Vitalij Tret’jakov, Russian journalist and political scientist, dean of the Moscow State University MV Lomonosov School of Television and regular guest on state propaganda programmes in Russia, subject to European sanctions from February 2023.

The Crimean map and the soothing narrative

Not to be outdone, the piece was accompanied by a map in which Crimea is coloured yellow like Russia, despite the fact that under international law it is Ukrainian and practically no country considers it part of the Russian Federation. An ‘error’ that is now regularly found in the magazine and can hardly be considered the result of carelessness.

The purpose of the piece seems clear: to reassure the old continent about Moscow’s real intentions. However, the pulpit from which the message comes would suggest that this is exactly what Moscow intends. On the other hand, the same editor of the magazine in February 2022 had extensively engaged with Italian public opinion (like other figures decidedly ‘sympathetic’ to Russia’s motives such as Marco Travaglio and Alessandro Di Battista) to assure it that no, Russia would never invade Ukraine. He had said this in an article that appeared in Limes on 15 February (you can read the full article here), then repeated it in an interview on the 18th of the same month, and finally repeated the same concept live on Otto e Mezzo, on La7, hosted by Lilli Gruber on 20 February.

Tret’jakov himself had been even more direct last year, explaining in another article, again in Limes, how Russia should ‘liquidate the Ukrainian black hole’, explaining that Moscow should at least secure control of Novorossija, using the term by which Catherine the Great had called the regions that currently extend into the south-east of the country.

Inconvenient collaborators and the Italian anomaly

It must be said that Tret’jakov’s is not an isolated case and not even the most striking among those of interest to Limes. The School linked to the magazine, for example, has among its collaborators Sergei Karaganov, Russian political scientist and economist, considered one of the founders of the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy as well as founder of strategic platforms for the support of Russian influence abroad such as the Valdai Discussion Club and the journal Russia in Global Politics (but he is also a member of the Scientific Committee of the Security Council of the Russian Federation with direct access to powerful figures such as Nikolai Patrushev) and Dmitry Trenin, a former GRU (military intelligence) colonel and member of the Council for International Affairs of the Russian Federation. Both characters who perhaps shouldn’t be in a school, since the former had called for the use of the atomic bomb against Poland and the latter in an interview in September 2022, proposed in turn the ‘preventive’ launch of nuclear warheads towards the USA to ‘bring back the feeling of fear in geopolitics’. Also on the Limes team is the ineffable General Fabio Mini, radically Putinian (i.e. linked to the figure of Alexander Dugin, the ideologue of Eurasianism, the theory behind Putin’s neo-imperialist doctrine), a former member of the scientific committee of extreme right-wing journals and author of statements made to Russian propaganda organs that are chilling to say the least, in which he speaks of territories ‘liberated’ (rather than occupied) by the Russians and of others ‘claimed by Ukraine’ (actually Ukrainian and, if anything, illegally claimed by the Russians).

That these characters are proposed with impunity to the general public without even a side note so that it is known that their judgement is tainted by propaganda and their opinion can therefore be manipulative is an all-Italian anomaly. Just as it is difficult to find examples in other civilised countries of such a massive presence on talk shows and various broadcasts of propagandists of alternative truths, altered and blatant historical falsehoods, disseminated and repeated without a shred of contradiction, by virtue of an alleged universal right to speak, transformed for the occasion into a very Italian right to lie.

Underestimating, either through carelessness or complicity, the fact that propaganda is a weapon in its own right, the use of which in the context of the permanent hybrid war against the West is amply codified in Soviet first and Russian later doctrine. And it is never an end in itself.