Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Friday that Europe should reopen high-level dialogue with Russia, urging the appointment of a special envoy.
Meloni echoed calls from last month by French President Emmanuel Macron, who said that it would be “in our interest as Europeans and Ukrainians to find the right framework” to re-engage Russia in talks rather than relying on US negotiators.
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“I think Macron is right on this. I believe the time has come for Europe to also speak with Russia,” Meloni told a press conference in Rome. “If Europe speaks to only one of the two sides on the field, I fear that the contribution it can make will be limited.”
She added that the EU should appoint an envoy to deal directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as since the beginning of negotiations “many voices have been speaking out.”
“If we were to make the mistake of deciding, on the one hand, to reopen dialogue with Russia, and on the other, to proceed in a disorganised way, we would be doing Putin a favour,” she said, concluding: “We have had this problem from the start. Too many voices speaking, too many formats.”
The Trump administration has been engaged in shuttle diplomacy with Ukraine and Europe on one side and Russia on the other, but Moscow has shown little willingness to make compromises to Kyiv and its allies equivalent to their own.
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The two leaders, who come from bitterly opposed political camps, met at the presidential palace in Warsaw on Friday for high-level talks after months of tension.
In November, Washington proposed that Russia be readmitted to the Group of Seven leading nations, a proposal that Meloni firmly rejected.
“Today it would seem impossible to me that, say, Russia would join the G7,” she said, adding that it was “absolutely premature” to discuss that issue.
Meloni also stressed that Italy would not align with France and the UK in deploying troops to Ukraine to secure a possible peace agreement, arguing that such a move would be unnecessary if Ukraine entered into a collective defense pact with Western allies similar to NATO’s Article 5.
She added that a limited foreign troop presence would not constitute a credible deterrent against Russia’s far larger military.