Italy's former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini was apparently seized by the pacifist-political travel bug.
The head of the right-wing national Lega wants to fly to Warsaw on Monday and then continue to the Polish-Ukrainian border.
From there he will bring "widows and orphans" from the Ukraine to Italy, he announced.
First, Salvini had planned an "unarmed march for peace" in Ukraine, possibly as far as Kyiv, with the participation of representatives of all Italian parties and ideally led by Pope Francis.
The fact that the pontiff currently has a bad knee and has to rest his leg on medical advice was not the reason for the failure of the “peaceful invasion” in Ukraine by Italy and the Holy See that Salvini had envisaged.
Matthias Rub
Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.
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Salvini also had no luck with Italian parties, associations and organizations, neither with allies nor with opponents.
Instead, only a small delegation of Lega representatives led by Salvini will make the journey to Warsaw and the border.
Even Salvini's substitute idea of launching an Italo-Hungarian peace initiative for Ukraine together with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Lemberg could not be realized.
"The most able statesman in the world"
Salvini's hectic activity for the cause of the Ukrainians comes as a surprise.
In addition to other populist politicians and parties on the Italian right and left, Salvini and parts of his Lega had been trying to get close to Russian President Vladimir Putin for many years.
Salvini liked to be photographed in T-shirts with Putin printed on them, because Salvini had long regarded the Russian president as “the most capable statesman in the world”.
On March 6, 2017, the then Lega Nord, already led by Salvini, signed an agreement with Putin's party "United Russia" in Moscow on cooperation and regular exchange for an initial period of five years.
It is unclear whether the validity of the agreement will be automatically extended by another five years this Sunday because it was not terminated by the Lega in good time six months before it expired.
At one point, the party claims that such a letter of resignation was sent to United Russia more than six months ago.
Another time it is said that the agreement is irrelevant anyway, because the Lega, which is represented throughout Italy, emerged from the former northern Italian regional party Lega Nord in 2018.
After all, the Lega is part of the broad coalition that has been in office since February 2021 under Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
It would be more than a small matter if an Italian ruling party remained de jure allied with Putin's United Russia party while Italy, along with its Western partners, imposed unprecedented sanctions on Putin and his power apparatus.
"We stand with the victims"
It was not easy for the Lega and especially party leader Salvini to go along with Draghi's anti-Russian change of course.
Up until the eve of the invasion, Draghi had unsuccessfully offered himself as a mediator to Putin.
When Rome then, again with its partners, decided to supply arms to Ukraine, Salvini initially let it be known that this was happening “not in my name”.
Before he swung to Draghi's course and announced: "The situation is clear: Putin is the aggressor, the Ukrainians are resisting and defending themselves.
And we stand with the victims.”
Giorgia Meloni from the post-fascist party “Brothers of Italy” reacted more quickly to the Russian invasion of Ukraine than Salvini.
In her speech at the CPAC annual congress of American conservatives in Florida on February 26, Meloni unequivocally acknowledged the transatlantic alliance and branded Putin's invasion as unacceptable aggression and an attack on Western values.
In the vote in Parliament in Rome, Meloni, whose party is the only opposition force of any size in Italy, voted with the Draghi government to sell arms to Ukraine.
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Vito Petrocelli of the left-wing populist Five Star Movement, one of the most prominent “Putin understanders” in Italian politics, voted no.
Meanwhile, Rome decided to declare a state of emergency to deal with the expected wave of a million refugees from Ukraine.
There are already 236,000 Ukrainians living in Italy, around three-quarters of them are women who work in Italian families as domestic help and as nurses and geriatric nurses.
Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese assured that the country was prepared to take in the refugees.
And the fact that the Ukrainian refugees are welcomed in Italy with open arms is now also the responsibility of Lamorgese's predecessor, Salvini, who closed the country's ports and borders to migrants during his tenure as interior minister.
He even wants to bring some of them from the Ukrainian-Polish border to Italy himself.