Italian Press Spoke About Putin's Strange Behavior

A story from an ally of Berlusconi, which will make you doubt the mental health of the head of the Kremlin.

Former member of the Italian Senate Fabrizio Cicchitto told one of the country's largest newspapers, Corriere della Sera, how Vladimir Putin killed two roe deer on the hunt, personally cut out the heart of the slain animal with a knife and offered it to Silvio Berlusconi, the long-term Prime Minister of Italy, at that time also a member of the Senate. Cicchitto represented Berlusconi's party Forza Italia in the upper house of the Italian parliament, Radio Liberty writes.

According to Cicchitto, the prime minister personally told him about Putin's cruelty, and the hunt made him "doubt" the human qualities of the Russian president. “Vladimir showed me a cruel character that I had never imagined before,” Cicchitto quoted Berlusconi.

The story, according to the publication Corriere della Sera, happened in 2013 in Russia, where Berlusconi was on vacation at Putin's country house (the publication did not specify the location).

“Putin offered to go hunting. As we walked through the snow, he saw two roe deer. After shooting both of them, he looked at me with satisfaction - and said: “Today I will offer you amazing food.” Holding a knife in his hand, he went down the hill to approach the animals. Then he extracted the heart from one of them. The man from his escort took out a wooden tray, gave it to me and put a piece of bleeding meat on it… I threw up,” Cicchitto quotes Berlusconi's story.

The La Stampa newspaper wrote about the episode of hunting in the country house in 2013 in an article about the relationship between Putin and Berlusconi, but it did not indicate the sources of information. Cicchitto confirmed that Berlusconi personally told him about the hunt.

Also, assessing the President of Russia, a former member of the Italian Senate said that “Putin was the first to understand that it is possible to use the Internet for politics and penetration into the system of liberal democracies, which he despises, and manipulate it. He supported Brexit through the Internet, the separatist referendum of Catalonia, the election campaign of Donald Trump. He always sought to destabilize the West. But Berlusconi hushed it up.”