Italy warns US support cuts could strengthen Russia’s war effort
Italy’s defence minister has sharply criticized any move by the United States to restrict satellite systems and intelligence used by Ukraine, calling it a “complete mistake” and a “major mistake” that could work against peace rather than toward it. Guido Crosetto said in a BBC interview that limiting those tools would create weakness on the Ukrainian side and give Vladimir Putin reason to believe he can still win on the battlefield.
If Ukraine loses access to the systems that help it detect, coordinate, and respond to attacks, the strategic balance changes fast.
Crosetto argued that such a shift would not pressure Moscow into compromise. Instead, it would prolong the war by signaling that the West is prepared to narrow support at the very moment Kyiv still depends on it to resist Russian attacks on infrastructure, cities, and military positions. Trump has denied asking for satellite access to be suspended, but the minister’s warning landed inside a broader argument in Rome that recent US choices are moving in the wrong direction.
The Italian response is especially pointed because Giorgia Meloni’s government has tried to keep backing Ukraine while managing rising domestic friction. Earlier this week, Meloni described Trump’s deal to buy diesel from Russia as a “very risky choice” and said it would grant Russia legitimacy while its forces continue bombing Ukrainian cities. Crosetto repeated the same logic in different terms: peace, he said, would come only when Putin concluded he had reached a stalemate and could not advance any further.
Crosetto, a co-founder of Meloni’s hard-right Fratelli d’Italia party, said Ukraine’s victory would amount to “a victory for peace, a victory for justice, a victory for international law.” He also said Italy would continue military support for as long as the current government remained in office, though he warned that parliamentary approval for future deliveries would become more difficult as elections approach.
Italy’s military aid to Kyiv has always been classified in detail, but the political direction has been clear. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, Meloni has positioned her government as one of Ukraine’s stauncher European allies despite public unease at home. That unease is now visible in opinion polling and on the streets, where energy prices, inflation, and the cost of the war have fed a more skeptical mood.
The domestic pressure is political, economic, and psychological all at once. Italians are feeling the rise in fuel costs, and that has created an opening for those arguing that support for Ukraine is too expensive or too remote from daily life to justify. In Rome on Friday, students protested against money going to arms instead of schools, while truckers in southern Italy blocked roads over higher fuel prices. One slogan captured the tension: “We want more classroom, not more bombs.”
Polling reflects that fatigue. An Ixè survey in September put support for continuing to supply arms at just 18%, a figure that helps explain why the government’s line on Ukraine remains politically fragile even as it stays formally unchanged. Crosetto pointed to multiple causes for the skepticism, including a long-standing pacifist tradition, old business ties to Moscow, and Italy’s geographic distance from the front line. He also accused Russia of running an active disinformation campaign aimed at weakening the political climate against support for Ukraine.
In that reading, battlefield aid is not just a foreign policy issue but a test of whether European publics can sustain a long war under pressure from higher prices and information warfare. Crosetto said it is difficult to explain to citizens struggling at the petrol pump why concessions to Russia cannot be made. Yet he framed the answer in terms of future security, insisting that resisting Russian pressure now is the only way to protect those same citizens later.
Questions around Italy’s own security have sharpened the debate further. The minister said a fire at an arms depot outside Rome in August was not arson but “human stupidity,” and he rejected an unproven report that Russia was preparing drone attacks on Italy, France, and Spain from container ships in the Mediterranean. Even so, he said cyber-attacks linked to Russia are now routine, with “hundreds every day,” and argued that Europe has responded too weakly.
“You can’t win a war if you don’t fight back,” he said.
Crosetto also avoided engaging with the growing influence of Roberto Vannacci, the leader of the far-right Futuro Nazionale party, which opinion polls currently place ahead of all Meloni’s coalition partners. Vannacci, a former general, opposes aid to Ukraine and says Europe is wasting money while Russia continues to advance on the ground. Crosetto dismissed questions about him and said he had more serious matters to deal with, but the political signal was hard to miss: support for Ukraine is becoming one of the clearest fault lines inside Italy’s right-wing camp.
At a broader level, the dispute goes to the core of what European leaders believe will end the war. Crosetto’s answer is blunt. Weakness invites more war, and any reduction in support risks making that outcome more likely rather than less.