Fresh on the heels of Silvio Berusconi’s admission that Vladimir Putin sent him “20 bottles of vodka and a really sweet letter” for his recent  birthday, the wily 86-year-old Italian ex-premier has now blamed the war in Ukraine not the Russian leader but on President Zelensky.

It is a devilish development that threatens to tarnish the credibility of the presumed next prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, at the very moment she needs to form a government — with Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia an essential coalition partner of her own party, Brothers of Italy. 

In a leaked audio clip now making the rounds of the Italian press, Mr. Berlusconi asks his Forza Italia supporters, “You know how the thing in Russia happened, right?” He then says that Ukraine had thrown a peace deal in the contested Donbas region “to the devil” and “started to attack the border with the two republics.”

“Among the soldiers who were deployed,” he claimed, “the republics suffered around five to six or seven thousand casualties. Zelensky comes on the scene and he triples the attacks on the two republics.” He goes on to say that the Russian people and parliament, but not Mr. Putin himself, pushed for a belligerent response to the alleged attacks.

In respect of Russia’s response to Ukraine’s alleged actions in its eastern regions, Mr. Berlusconi said darkly that “the war, instead of being a two-week operation, has become a war that will last for 200 years or more.” 

Mr. Berlusconi’s remarks came on the heels of the now infamous “decent people” comment he made to an Italian television program last month: The Russian troops “were supposed to enter, reach Kyiv in a week, replace the Zelensky government with decent people and then come back after a week.” By contrast with that statement, Mr. Berlusconi reportedly had asked his party allies to not make his new remarks public. 

Mr. Berlusconi is widely acknowledged as a kingmaker in Italian politics, even though the firebrand Ms. Meloni has demonstrated that she can quite capably outmaneuver him when the circumstances warrant. For reasons of domestic politics she needs Forza Italia and Mr. Berlusconi knows it, but on the international stage the elder statesman’s controversial verbiage is quickly becoming a liability. 

Adding to the political chaos — itself not a novelty in Rome — is that as junior partner in Ms. Meloni’s right-wing coalition, Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia is gunning for the foreign ministry, at a time when Ms. Meloni and the EU have strongly backed Ukraine in Russia’s war. According to the AP, some analysts are even suggesting that Mr. Berlusconi is intending to sabotage her future government.

Ms. Meloni, for her part, is doubling down. “Italy will never be the weak link of the West with us in government,” she said in a statement late Wednesday. “Italy, with its head high, is part of Europe and the NATO Atlantic alliance,” she added. “Whoever doesn’t agree with this cornerstone cannot be part of the government, at the cost of not having a government.”

Ms. Meloni can talk the talk like few others in Europe today, and it can be expected she will publicly distance herself from the latest Berlusconi bombshell, too. They just keep coming, though,  meaning she will have to prove she can not only talk the talk but walk the walk — even while shaking up the government.