Several pro-Moscow receptions are scheduled across the country in the coming weeks, one even featuring the far-right Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin. All is happening just months away from the EU elections, a “functional junction for the destabilisation of our democracies,” according to EP Vice-President Picierno
Kyiv names and shames Modena. On Thursday, the Ukrainian Embassy in Italy asked the Municipality of the Northern Italian city to withdraw its authorisation for the use of a civic hall. The object of their protest is the event that’s scheduled to take place there on January 20: “Mariupol. Rebirth after the war,” a conference-exhibition dedicated to Russia’s reconstruction of the occupied Ukrainian city on the Azov Sea, which was levelled during Moscow’s bombing raids in the first phase of the full-scale invasion and has been occupied since May 2022, after a long siege.
Pure Kremlin-speak. In the literature describing the event, Mariupol is defined as “a city-symbol of the popular uprising of the Donbass against the Kyiv junta, a martyr city of the eight-year bandit occupation” that “now faces a fast process of reconstruction under the aegis of the institutions of the Russian Federation, of which it has become an integral part.”
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The exhibition-conference is thus designed to present the Modenese public with “the results of the new city administration after the final liberation in the spring of 2022, with the surrender of the Azov battalion barricaded in the Azovstal steelworks.”
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Speakers include Luca Rossi, President of the Russia Emilia-Romagna Cultural Association, which organised the event; Dmitry Shtodin, Russian Consul-General; Eliseo Bertolasi, Italian representative of the International Russophile Movement; and Andrea Lucidi, a freelance, Russia-aligned “journalist” active in the Donbas.
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Mr Lucidi was recently the subject of a parliamentary interrogation for having attended an event hosted by the Italian Embassy in Moscow – a “paradoxical” instance, as the government noted.
Italian here, a bit of info:
The meeting in Modena will likely get cancelled. The mayor published an update today on his social media where he claims that an administrative investigation will take place where the grant of public space will be reconsidered in light of the information about the event. It was probably granted as an oversight.
The meeting with dugin will happen and can’t not happen. Dugin will be in video call from Russia. The call will take place in a private structure, there is nothing anybody - even the police - can do about it. There will be protests. I will be there. But the event will take place regardless.
If y’all and I gather in my living room and we make cheerful poems about the holocaust and chant heil Hitler to each other’s face it’s still legal. You can say anything you want in your private space. This is not Russia, as much as those pieces of shit gathering there would like to.