The afternoon light fell softly through the tall windows of a piano nobile on Via Gregoriana, just beyond the Spanish Steps, in Rome, where the Euro-Gulf Information Centre has its headquarter. Oleksiy Goncharenko settled into his chair. Rome had just witnessed, the day before, a moment of considerable diplomatic weight: Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had arrived at Palazzo Chigi to meet Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — his convoy winding through streets still damp from spring rain, trailed by cameras and security details. The meeting was the first since a particularly tense stretch in Italian-American relations, with Meloni navigating the choppy waters of a fractured transatlantic alliance.

One day later, the Italian Prime Minister was already on a plane to Paris, where she would meet Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, and Friedrich Merz to discuss the crisis brewing around the Strait of Hormuz.

It was in this charged atmosphere that the Euro-Gulf Information Centre had convened the event. Matthew Robinson, the Centre’s director, did not mince words in setting the scene. “Europeans cannot necessarily control what the Russian president decides,” he said before the session opened, “but they can control what they are deciding — and how seriously they are strengthening European security.” The remark carried the quiet urgency of an institution that has spent years insisting that the Gulf and European theaters of instability are not separate stories but chapters of the same one.

Into this diplomatic whirlwind walked Goncharenko — member of the Verkhovna Rada, representative of the European Solidarity party founded by former President Petro Poroshenko, and a delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He is not a man given to comfortable platitudes. Precise, historically minded, and disarmingly frank, he speaks like someone who has spent years trying to make Western audiences understand something they find emotionally inconvenient: the war being fought in the fields of eastern Ukraine is not a local conflict. It is the opening front of a global reckoning.

“Call it the third world war, or some other global conflict. But in one way or another, we are already there.“

One Axis, Many Fronts

Goncharenko’s central argument — the one he returned to repeatedly, the one he clearly considers most urgent — is that the world has already entered a new kind of global conflict, one that most Western democracies are not yet psychologically prepared to name.
“From the beginning of the full-scale invasion,” he said, “I have believed the world is already in a global conflict. And what happened in Israel, then across the Middle East, now with Iran — it just proves it for me.” The architecture of this conflict, in his reading, is unmistakable: on one side, a coalition of autocracies — Russia, Iran, North Korea, with China as the essential silent enabler. On the other, the democracies of the West. “Without China,” he said plainly, “Russia would not survive. They would not be able to continue this war.“

The evidence, he argued, is not abstract. In October 2022, Russian forces struck targets in Odessa — his hometown, which he described with evident feeling as “the capital of the Black Sea and the most Italian city of Ukraine” — using Iranian-made Shaheed drones. Those same drones, refined and upgraded with every lesson learned on Ukrainian battlefields, are now striking targets in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and American military installations across the Gulf. The trajectory from Odessa to the Strait of Hormuz is not metaphorical. It is logistical. “We see a very deep cooperation between these two countries,” he said, “and not just the original Shaheeds — very modernized ones already, because they use all the lessons from the war.“

The direct line between Ukraine and the Middle East, between what happens in Kherson and what threatens shipping lanes in the Gulf — this is the argument Goncharenko wants European audiences to absorb. Not as a rhetorical flourish, but as a strategic reality that changes the calculus of support.

Deputy Oleksiy Goncharenko with Piercamillo Falasca, director of L’Europeista

The Fragile Architecture of Western Unity

When asked about the turbulence in transatlantic relations — Meloni’s difficult weeks after her public exchange with President Trump, the European leaders converging in Paris — Goncharenko chose his words with the care of a man who needs both Washington and Brussels to stay alive.
“It is a hard time today, for sure,” he said. “But in the end of the day, we need one another.” His advice on Trump was strikingly pragmatic: don’t overreact to any single statement. “He quickly changes his rhetoric. What he said today doesn’t mean he will think this tomorrow.” And, he added, with the longer view of a politician who thinks in decades rather than news cycles: “In three years, when President Trump will stop being president, the United States and Europe will still be there, and we will still be very much interdependent.“
The stakes, he made clear, were not Ukraine’s alone. “The only places in the world that would be happy to see our split and rupture,” he said, leaning forward slightly, “would be in Moscow and Beijing. And in Tehran also.” A transatlantic fracture, in other words, would not merely inconvenience Ukraine. It would hand the autocratic axis precisely the strategic gift it has been working toward since before the first tank crossed the Ukrainian border.

Democracy Under Martial Law

Only here, midway through the conversation, did Goncharenko turn to a subject closer and more uncomfortable: the state of democracy inside Ukraine itself. He chose his words carefully — not to protect Zelensky, but to frame the tension accurately.
“Zelensky is the great voice of the country and the great face of the country abroad,” he said. “But martial law time is not the best time for democracy to flourish. And when it is more than four years, any government would probably get used to this.” Last year’s corruption scandals — allegations touching on the president’s personal circle, reports of pressure on Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption bodies — had exposed, in Goncharenko’s words, “how fragile the situation is.” With elections constitutionally suspended under martial law, democratic accountability has effectively been put on hold.
And yet, he insisted, this is precisely why the fight must continue on both fronts simultaneously. “We try, in a very balanced way, to protect democracy inside the country without hurting the country abroad and inside,” he said. The logic was almost mathematical in its clarity: “If Ukraine would become a small autocracy, it would sooner or later lose to a bigger one — I’m speaking about Russia. But a small democracy, as Ukraine showed in the beginning of this full-scale invasion, can survive.” Democracy, in this reading, is not a luxury for peacetime. It is a strategic asset.

After the War, What Remains of Zelensky?

The most speculative — and perhaps most revealing — exchange came when the conversation turned to what Italians call fantapolitica: the what-if game. What becomes of Zelensky after peace?
Goncharenko paused. “He has two options,” he said finally. The first: honoring his 2019 pledge not to seek a second term, stepping aside as a wartime leader of historic stature — “a president who protected the country in its most difficult moment.” There are, he noted, “many questions to him in Ukraine,” but those questions do not erase what he built. The second option is darker: clinging to power, seeking reelection in ways that erode rule of law. “In this case, he will lose his heritage. Instead of being the person who protected the country, he can become a problem for the country.“
When asked whether the EU could smooth that transition — perhaps offering Zelensky a senior European institutional role, a dignified exit into multilateral statesmanship — Goncharenko opened his hands and smiled. “Maybe, maybe, why not? There are many international roles where he could be effective.”

The Lesson Europe Refuses to Learn

The conversation ended where it perhaps needed to begin. A motto used by L’Europeista — what happens to Ukraine today will happen to Europe tomorrow — drew Goncharenko into a direct challenge to Western European complacency.
“Many people in Ukraine were saying the same thing before 2022,” he said quietly. “Russia is not going to attack, it’s crazy in the 21st century, with tanks…” He let the silence do the work. Less than forty years ago, Eastern Germany was under Soviet control. The Balkans were partly within Moscow’s sphere. All of Eastern Europe answered to the Kremlin. “If again Eastern Europe is under Russian control, and the United States is no longer interested in Europe, and China is more and more powerful — what will Europe do? It will be a vassal. A victim of economic blackmail.“

Ukraine, he argued, is not simply a country Europe is helping. It is a country Europe needs — for its demographics, its resources, its military capacity, its geography. “If Italy and Europe want to be part of a great geopolitical game” he said, “they need Ukraine.“

The €90 billion EU loan — frozen until last week by Hungary’s veto in a dispute over Russian oil pipeline transit, and now unblocked thanks to the newly elected Peter Mágyar — came up last. Gratitude and frustration, he said, coexist in Ukrainian society without contradiction. “We are really thankful. It’s not just words.” He drew the long arc of Ukrainian history: a century ago, Ukraine tried to break free from the Russian Empire and failed, in part because the West did not come. “The reason we are still alive today is because we received support from Europe this time.” But then, asked not to give a diplomatic answer, he went further: “There is also a lot of frustration. People think European countries and the United States could do more. Thanks to you, we can survive and continue to fight. But because you are not ready to support more, we can’t clearly win.“

Outside, the Roman afternoon has giving way to evening. The global conflict Goncharenko describes — stretching from the drone factories of Tehran to the battlefields of Donbas, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Black Sea coast of Odessa — has no clean edges, and no certain end. What it has, he would say, is a logic. And that logic does not stop at anyone’s border.

Oleksiy Goncharenko spoke at a public event organized by the Euro-Gulf Information Centre in Rome on April 16, 2026.

Deputy Oleksiy Goncharenko with Matthew Robinson, director of the Euro-Gulf Information Centre