Minister Urso: “Italy must become a logistical base for Ukraine. Starting with the ports”

“We would like the ports of Trieste and Venice to somehow become ports of Ukraine as well and that the Europe quadrant with the logistics platform of Verona, the largest on the continent, becomes their logistics base”. Thus the Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso, speaks to Il Messaggero about Italy’s intentions to contribute to the reconstruction of Ukraine. Urso, accompanied among others by the president of Confindustria, Charles Bonomiarrived in Kyiv yesterday to offer support to the invaded country and meet the president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The minister referred to the recovery of maritime corridors, in order to guarantee support to Ukraine, but not only. Together with Bonomi, in fact, the primary intent is to create the basis for concrete industrial and commercial cooperation between the two countries. As reported yesterday on these pages, Italy considers the steel sector to be a fundamental sector and, in fact, Urso himself declared that our country will be more present “in the sectors of high technology, aerospace, iron and steel and of metallurgy”; fields, the latter, in which the Ukrainians are already important producers, as evidenced by the Azovstal of Mariupol.

And the practical effects of yesterday’s agreements will be seen in early March. Indeed, in those days a conference will be held in Rome to discuss the future of Ukraine and its reconstruction, in continuity with the one that has already been held in Paris. “The Infrastructure Minister, Kubrakov, illustrated the guidelines of their reconstruction project, in which Italian companies will participate. And we have guaranteed Italy’s support to Kyiv in every forum, including the multilateral one”, Urso reported. Even before the meeting in Rome, however, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni should travel to the Ukrainian capital: this is what Urso confirmed and has already emerged from the indiscretions that followed the summit at Palazzo Chigi on Wednesday between the premier, the foreign minister and the Interior Minister.

Next month, the Ukrainian government will present a plan to the international community that will highlight priorities for business intervention. And, Adolfo Urso, already as head of Copasir, had begun to work on the relationship of cooperation and friendship between the two countries. So that with Bonomi the new Confindustria office in Kyiv has already been inaugurated. Moreover, the private effort in the invaded country is also a political gesture – and not just an economic one. Bonomi himself spoke yesterday about the reconstruction of Ukraine as part of the process of its accession to the European Union.