Vladimir Putin shot dead a deer on a hunting trip, cut out its heart and offered it to Silvio Berlusconi, a political ally of the late Italian prime minister claims.
Mr Berlusconi, who died last year, was so shocked by the incident that he stepped behind a tree and vomited, according to the account.
The bizarre and bloody vignette was recounted by Fabrizio Cicchitto, a former senator and a member of Mr Berlusconi’s centre-Right Forza Italia party.
He said Mr Berlusconi, who famously boasted of his close personal relationship with president Putin, was on a hunting trip with him in 2013 in the Russian countryside. The pair were staying at one of the Russian leader’s dachas.
“Vladimir showed me a violent side that I had not imagined in such a kind and rational man,” the Italian prime minister said, as recalled by Mr Cicchitto to Corriere della Sera newspaper. “Putin said to me, ‘let’s go hunting’ and I thought hunting? I’ve never touched a rifle in my life. But he insisted and so I went with him.”
They were walking through the snow when Putin spotted a pair of roe deer. He handed Mr Berlusconi a rifle and offered him the first shot. Mr Berlusconi, who had no interest in hunting, demurred.
The Russian leader then promptly shot both the deer himself. “He gave me a satisfied look and said: ‘Today I will present you with an extraordinary meal’,” Mr Berlusconi told his political ally.
Walking over to the animals’ corpses, he pulled out a hunting knife, cut one of the deer open and wrenched out its heart. He placed it on a wooden tray that was brought to him by a member of the hunting party. Presenting the hunk of bloodied flesh to Mr Berlusconi, he said: “This will be an exceptional dish.”
The gesture turned Mr Berlusconi’s stomach. “I went behind a tree and I vomited,” he said, according to Mr Cicchitto.
The Italian leader often boasted of his close relationship with Putin, which lasted for abount two decades. They spent time together in Italy and Russia and were famously photographed on one occasion wearing giant fur hats and on another tossing a ball for Mr Berlusconi’s pet poodle at his residence in Rome. The Italian politician even gave Putin a duvet cover printed with a life-size image of the two of them.
Mr Berlusconi’s apologism for Putin’s regime became increasingly contentious after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, the Italian billionaire boasted that he had received 20 bottles of Russian vodka and a “very sweet” letter from Putin for his 86th birthday.
The remarks prompted anger from Ukraine, with Ukrainian diplomats in Italy saying that “twenty bottles of free vodka are not a good enough reason for rekindling relations with a criminal and an assassin”.
Mr Berlusconi claimed that the Russian invasion was intended simply to install “decent people” in Kyiv. “The troops were supposed to enter, reach Kyiv in a week, replace the Zelensky government with decent people and then come back after a week,” he told an Italian television programme.
“Instead, they encountered an unexpected level of resistance which was then fed by the supply of weapons of all kinds from the West.”
Source Agencies
