Matteo Salvini, Italy’s vice-premier, loves frames that make audience: the pragmatic man who sees ‘how things really are‘, the politician who says what others do not have the courage to say’.

On Sunday 25 January 2026, from the stage of a Lega Lega rally in Rivisondoli, Abruzzo, he chose the most convenient and most useful version – not in Rome, but in Moscow: if the war continues, it is because Kyiv does not want peace.

The sentence is a concentrate of tried and tested rhetoric, the Kremlin’s perfect propagandist’s manual: Zelensky ‘complains’ after ‘all the money’ he has received; Ukraine ‘is losing’; therefore he must ‘sign the peace agreement as soon as possible’, choosing ‘between defeat and defeat’. Words designed to nail the attacker to the dock and shift the focus away from the aggressor.

The Ukrainian reply – signed by Heorhii Tykhyi, Foreign Ministry spokesman – came with a weapon of style and dignity: historical memory. Tykhyi reminded (or perhaps, taught) Salvini that ‘between 3 and 5 thousand Ukrainians‘ took part in the battle of Monte Cassino and‘did not choose between defeat and defeat‘, even when ‘victory seemed a long way off‘; they fought, he says, ‘because the freedom of Italy and the whole of Europe was at stake‘. And he concludes with a diplomatic stylistic jab: if Salvini really cares about peace, he should address ‘not the President of Ukraine… but Putin, who unleashed this war‘.

Monte Cassino: the battle Tykhyi refers to

Montecassino was one of the hinges of the Italian campaign in the Second World War, a series of battles (January-May 1944) along the Gustav Line that cost tens of thousands of lives. The turning point came in the final phase, when the Polish II Corps under General Władysław Anders attacked the German positions and on 18 May 1944 hoisted the Polish flag over the ruins of the abbey, opening the way to Rome.

Within that Polish II Corps – made up largely of men who had gone through deportations, imprisonment and exile in Eastern Europe – there were also thousands of Ukrainians (by birth or from the regions then part of pre-war Poland). It is to this entanglement that Tykhyi refers when he speaks of Monte Cassino: a piece of European history in which, literally, Italy’s freedom was also defended by soldiers from the East, now dismissed by the ‘realist’ Salvini as troublesome recipients of Western aid.

The rhetorical trick: turning Ukraine into the problem

The Lega Nord secretary’s communicative strategy – which resembles more a stable order than an analysis – is to consolidate a precise thesis: it is the Ukrainian government that does not want peace. It is a useful narrative because it overturns the relationship between cause and effect: war is no longer the result of the Russian invasion, but the obstinacy of those who resist; peace is no longer the consequence of the aggressor’s withdrawal, but the surrender of the aggressed.

It is also, not coincidentally, one of the most recurring lines in the Putin ecosystem in Europe: propagating the idea that ‘the solution’ already exists (territorial concessions and the neutralisation of Kyiv) and that it is Ukrainian ‘stubbornness’ that prevents it. Propaganda under the label of common sense.

The evidence: it is Moscow that sabotages the negotiations, while pretending to negotiate

The detail that spoils the Rivisondoli spectacle is that the reality – that of the negotiations, of the conditions set – tells otherwise. The facts indicate that Russia continues to set maximalist and territorial conditions as a precondition, not as the outcome of negotiations.

The Russian line is constant: diplomatic optimism on the front, substantial rigidity underneath – with demands not only for pieces of land, but to reduce Ukrainian sovereignty to a negotiable concept.

Here is the political point that Salvini deliberately avoids: if ‘peace’ coincides with the acceptance of the aggressor’s demands (territory, geopolitical status, security architecture), then it is not a peace agreement; it is a reward for the invasion war. It is exactly the kind of precedent that makes Europe more dangerous, not safer.

The Ukrainian (and Italian) lesson: peace is not the opposite of resistance

Tykhyi, with Monte Cassino, is recalling a wonderful ‘Italian fact’. In 1944, one did not ‘choose’ between two modes of surrender; one fought because the alternative was an order imposed by force. Today, with other actors and other maps, the grammar remains similar: if those who invade understand that it is enough to hold out, pretend tables and claim territory to get what they want, then war becomes a rational investment, a cheap meal.