A month ahead of highly anticipated elections in Italy, the outspoken leader of the country’s populist Northern League party, Matteo Salvini, is calling on the EU to reassess sanctions imposed on Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in February. “I’m asking that we evaluate the effectiveness of these instruments,” Mr. Salvini said in an article for Rome’s La Repubblica, adding: “If they are working, fine, but if they hit the sanctioning countries more than Russia … they will stoke the war rather than promoting peace.”

Mr. Salvini’s affinity for the regime of President Putin is well known and puts him in the quixotic category of Italian politicians colloquially called “filoputiniana,” which translates proximately to “fans of Putin.” In Mr. Salvini’s case, inexplicable enthusiasm for the current keeper of the Kremlin may have crossed the line into something more problematic. 

As the Sun reported last month, the firebrand politician was implicated in a scandal involving alleged Northern League ties to Moscow that may have had a role in bringing down the government of Prime Minister Draghi, whose support for Ukraine has been matched in Europe only by that of the British prime minister, Boris Johnson. The collapse of Mr. Draghi’s coalition is what led to the snap elections slated for September 25. 

Does Mr. Salvini have a point? Another article in La Repubblica, published today, posits that after six months of sanctions, the “Russian economy suffers but does not collapse,” thanks to revenue from oil sales and “Soviet Union methods.” Industrial production is down, according to the paper, but the IMF, in a less dire assessment than it has made previously, now says that Russia’s GDP is off “by only six percent.” 

If sanctions do not have a scorpion’s sting, they have certainly battered the Russian economy and shattered its prospects for any kind of growth, but like Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, Mr. Salvini seems more concerned about the domestic economic impact of sanctions — chiefly soaring energy costs as winter draws nearer — than with punishing Russia. 

The Italian politician’s increasingly vocal comments on the subject of sanctions move his positions into closer alignment with those of Mr. Orbán, Mr. Putin’s best ally in the EU, who last month said the bloc had “shot itself in the lungs” by keeping up Russian sanctions. The Italian newspaper La Stampa, which first broke the story of Mr. Salvini’s unsavory comminglings with the Kremlin, hit out at the 49-year-old from Milan today with the headline, “Salvini Marries Orbán.”

He is not the only Putin aficionado in la casa Italiana, so to speak. A regional political candidate named Stefania Modestino D’Angelo, affiliated with a better-known Italian member of the European Parliament, Carlo Calenda, has sparked a furor with a series of Facebook posts that are sharply critical of President Biden and President Zelensky, who she stated went “from Nazi to hero of the Democratic Party.” She called the EU’s Ursula Von der Leyen “a waitress” and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, a “delivery boy.”

Italian politics is seldom dull. Creative verbiage aside, though, Europe’s long-term commitment to supporting Ukraine is at issue. Prime Minister Johnson said the British are paying higher energy bills as part of the price of freedom in Europe, because “Ukrainians are paying in blood.” In a similar vein, Mr. Macron yesterday called on his nation to “accept paying the price of liberty.” That kind of language will not be on the lips of the filoputiniana, as exemplified by Mr. Salvini. 

What makes that problematic in the near term is that his Northern League party forms the right-wing alliance that includes the national-conservative Brothers of Italy party, led by 45-year-old Giorgia Meloni, and the center-right Forza Italia party, led by a former premier, Silvio Berlusconi. While the Brothers of Italy is considered to be far right of the political center in Italy, Ms. Meloni herself has been a staunch advocate of the Ukrainian cause.

Euronews reported that her party “backed Mr Draghi’s moves to send weapons to Ukraine, even as Messrs. Salvini and Berlusconi, open admirers of Vladimir Putin, issued only tepid support.” The Northern League and Brothers of Italy parties both take a tough line on illegal immigration. 

If the nascent coalition prevails at the polls in September, Ms. Meloni will likely have to work overtime to convince the rest of her EU partners that she is no friend of Mr. Putin, and that Italy can be a truly reliable force for liberty’s cause on the Continent. That sizable task may well start with a sit-down with Mr. Salvini even before Italians cast their ballots next month.