
Former PM Giuseppe Conte said that shirking political debate on Ukraine aid would be bullying democracy itself, in response to Defense Minister Guido Crosetto labelling him a "neighborhood bully."
Conte, who leads the Five Star Movement (M5S), addressed tens of thousands of Italians who rallied against the war on Saturday, telling them the new government's approach is "leading only to escalation." Now that Ukraine is "fully armed," Italy needs to push for a ceasefire and peace talks, he said.












Comment: It's worth noting that Algeria has the world's sixteenth-largest oil reserves and the ninth-largest reserves of natural gas, and it was only a few months ago that the EU was courting them in an attempt to alleviate their self-inflicted energy crisis. It has recently also 'strengthened bilateral cooperation with China and is a historical ally of Russia which helped it gain its independence from France'.
Taken together, the Western establishment's death grip on the planet just gets weaker and weaker. Although this in itself is a cause for alarm because pathological personalities when threatened with irrelevance are liable to lash out, and, indeed, we can expect the West won't go quietly.