The meeting of Starmer, Merz and Macron with Zelensky on December 8th and the reaffirmed solidarity of the ‘willing’ with Ukraine provoked the angry reaction of Trump, who again intimated that the attackers should accept the aggressors’ conditions and implicitly threatened – ‘you are losing ‘ – the Ukrainians to make Putin’s job easier, denying what very little, but essential contribution the US still gives them: intelligence support and arms sales (paid for by European states).

It doesn’t take much to realise that the European obstacle still prevents Trump from doing what he would like – giving Putin what he asks for, disarming Ukraine and presenting the EU with tomorrow’s financial bill – but that at the same time Europe’s hold on support for Kyiv is entrusted to countries heavily conditioned by Russian-American threats, strong sovereignist and Putinist minorities and the declared hostility of other countries – Hungary, Slovakia and since yesterday also the Czech Republic – officially siding with the Kremlin.

In this game, Italy has always kept itself balanced on the edge of equivocation and duplicity, with the declared intention of acting as a bridge between the EU and the White House and with the unconfessed but evident aim of not taking clear positions either in support of the Anglo-French-German bloc or the group aligned with Moscow via Budapest.

It was all too clear that at some point the redde rationem would come for Meloni and that not only prejudice for the Meloni of the past, but also scepticism about the Meloni of the present and future led to the conclusion that if Trump had gone through with it she would never have sided against him on the side of London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and that bloc of Scandinavian and Baltic countries most exposed to Moscow’s threats.

Yesterday’s meeting in Rome between Meloni and Zelensky confirmed that this prediction is much more than an inference. There was no joint press conference, where Meloni was supposed to answer journalists’ questions in front of Zelensky, without taking refuge in a statement that says literally nothing.
All the leaked, leaked and undenied rumours say that Meloni would have tried to make Zelensky gobble up the bitter chalice of painful concessions, while Zelensky asked her to oppose Trump’s design and put her weight behind the ‘willing’ Europeans.

In the more than three years of the Meloni government, Italy’s economic and military support for Ukraine was literally irrelevant. With respect to security guarantees for Ukraine after a possible armed truce, Italy immediately called off.
Italy’s only real help to Ukraine is that it has so far not put its political weight explicitly behind openly anti-Ukrainian solutions. This has objectively cracked the sovereignist front, albeit with the equivocal and ambivalent attitude we mentioned.

But it was clear that, when forced to choose, Meloni would have as her only alternative to breaking with Trump and the European sovereignists the betrayal of Ukraine. The time of that ‘when’ is approaching, and the choice Meloni will make unfortunately seems to have been announced.