The increase in migration “on the southern front” of Europe from Africa is part of “a clear hybrid war strategy of the Wagner division, mercenaries in the pay of Russia,” Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said on Monday. “It can already be stated that the exponential increase in the migratory phenomenon from the African coasts is also part, to a not inconsiderable extent, of a clear hybrid war strategy that the Wagner division, mercenaries in the pay of Russia, is putting into practice, using its considerable weight in some African countries,” he said in a statement.
A trusted person of the Italian Prime Minister, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, Crosetto makes these statements at a time when the Italian government is facing serious criticism for its management of migration, after two recent shipwrecks in which at least 79 people have died. and there are dozens of missing.
“Just as they realized that cyber attacks were part of the global confrontation that the Ukrainian conflict has opened, they should now realize that the southern European front is also becoming more dangerous every day,” the minister insisted, in a call from attention to the EU and NATO.
For this reason “they should also realize that uncontrolled and continuous immigration, added to the economic and social crisis, becomes a way of hitting the most exposed countries, Italy in the first place, and their geostrategic options, clear and sharp” , he claimed. For Crosetto, NATO “runs the risk of cracking if the countries most exposed to reprisals of various kinds are left alone, such as the opening of immigration faucets by some states.”
Currently there is not “a numerical alarm, although there is a humanitarian and operational one, regarding arrivals by sea” in Italy, the spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Italy, Flavio di Giacomo, told EFE on Monday, who He recalled that in 2022 there was a flow of four or five million people arriving in three months from Ukraine that was “perfectly managed by the EU”.
The figure of 685,000 migrants who would be willing to cross the Mediterranean in Libya and disembark in Italy is “misleading, implausible and the result of an incorrect interpretation,” he said about information published this Sunday by Il Corriere della sera.
At least 30 people are missing and 17 could be saved after the boat in which they were traveling capsized this Sunday during rescue efforts by a merchant ship in the Libyan rescue zone.
