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.”

• 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.”

• 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.

• 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.

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