Draghi: Putin risks food catastrophe, the UN intervenes

“Confrontation with Putin is necessary to solve the problem of grain, of food security. The risk of a food catastrophe is real: and if there is no solution, it must be clear that Putin is to blame.” Mario Draghi said this at the table of the European Council, according to what is learned while the informal summit of the EU heads of state and government is underway in Brussels. “We must win the battle over food security. It is also a way to show the poorest countries, for example in Africa, that we are on their side”, he stressed. “The UN can play an important role in resolving the food crisis, but we have a duty to ask ourselves how we can help. We must accelerate,

“It is essential that Putin does not win this war. At the same time, we must ask ourselves if it can be useful to talk to him. I am skeptical of the usefulness of these phone calls, but there are reasons for making them. These conversations show that it is Putin who does not want peace. “, he has declared. “It must be Ukraine that decides what peace it wants. If Ukraine does not agree on the terms, peace cannot be sustainable.”
Before the start of the meeting, the Prime Minister had a trilateral meeting with the French President Emmanuel Macron and with the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Then during the meeting he reaffirmed the Italian position on sanctions in Moscow and in particular on those concerning oil, on which there is a risk of a painful split: “We must maintain unity on the sanctions. Italy agrees on the package, as long as there are no imbalances between member states “. More generally, he supported the need to diversify the sources of energy supply and make the Old Continent autonomous from Russia: “We cannot imagine that after the conflict our energy policy will return to the way it was before. What happened is too brutal.

Anti-Russian sanctions and support for Ukraine will also be discussed during the leaders’ dinner and there will also be a video link by President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky. Draghi guarantees him Italian support for EU membership: “Offering Ukraine the status of candidate country can be an important symbolic gesture, a message of support in the midst of war”.