Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a phone call with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni after Italy took over the rotating presidency of the G7, which includes the US, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and Italy.
Meloni spoke to Zelenskyy on 4 January in her first call to an international leader as G7 president, according to Reuters. The Italian prime minister assured the Ukrainian president that Rome would continue supporting Kyiv in the war against Russia.
Earlier, Meloni said she believed that the West should persist in supplying arms and material support to Ukraine.
“The only way to reach any kind of diplomatic solution in Ukraine, any kind of negotiation, is to maintain the balance between forces on the ground” Meloni had stated.
During the recent phone call, Zelenskyy and Meloni also discussed further security cooperation, in particular joint defense production, the President’s Office reported.
In 2023, Italy recognized the Holodomor, the mass famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, as genocide. The resolution recognizing the Holodomor as genocide was supported by 130 members of the Italian Senate.
The Italian senators noted that in 1932-1933, the USSR, led by Joseph Stalin, “deliberately provoked a famine that caused millions of deaths, mostly of peasants and small landowners,” among the civilian population of Ukraine.
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