Italy has said that companies that have supported Russia’s aggression by continuing to cooperate with it should not benefit from Ukraine’s reconstruction efforts, Reuters reports.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told participants in a Rome conference that Italy would allocate 10 billion euros to help rebuild war-torn Ukraine.
Addressing reporters alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Meloni said: “The path for us is clear:
to continue to support Ukraine and on the other hand, to maintain or to indeed increase the pressure on Russia,
above all through sanctions.”
Since February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the European Union has approved several rounds of sanctions targeting Russian energy resources, banks and the military industry. Hundreds of billions of euros worth of Russian state bank assets have also been frozen.
The Italian Treasury said it was talking about banning companies that do business with Russia. Two of Italy’s largest banks, Intensa San Paolo and UniCredit, still operate there. Meloni’s government has given UniCredit nine months to cease operations in Russia.
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