Putin cut out the heart of a roe deer while hunting

Former member of the Italian Senate Fabrizio Ciccitto told one of the largest newspapers in the country, Corriere della Sera, how Russian President Vladimir Putin killed two roe deer while hunting, personally cut out the heart of the dead animal with a knife and offered it to Silvio Berlusconi, the long-time Prime Minister of Italy, and at that time also a member of the Senate, to eat it. Ciccitto represented Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in the upper house of the Italian parliament.

According to Ciccitto, the former prime minister himself told him about Putin’s cruelty, who was forced by the hunt to “doubt” the human qualities of the Russian president. “Vladimir showed me a cruel character that I had not imagined before,” Ciccitto quotes Berlusconi as saying to him.

The story itself, according to the publication Corriere della Sera, took place in 2013 in Russia, where Berlusconi was on vacation at Putin’s dacha (where exactly, the publication does not say).

“Putin suggested we go hunting. As we walked through the snow, he saw two roe deer. Having shot both, he looked at me with satisfaction and said: “Today I will offer you amazing food.” Holding a knife in his hand, he went down the slope, to approach the animals. Then he removed the heart from one of them. A man from his escort took out a wooden tray, gave it to me and put a piece of bleeding meat on it… I vomited,” Ciccitto quotes Berlusconi as saying.

• I wrote about the episode with winter hunting at the dacha back in 2013 La Stampa newspaper in an article about the relationship between Putin and Berlusconi, but it did not indicate sources of information. Ciccitto confirmed that Berlusconi personally told him about the hunt.

Also assessing the Russian President, a former member of the Italian Senate said that “Putin was the first to understand that through the Internet it is possible to carry out politics and penetrate and manipulate the system of liberal democracies, which he despises. Through the Internet he supported Brexit, the separatist referendum of Catalonia, the election Donald Trump’s campaign. He always sought to destabilize the West. But Berlusconi hushed it up.”

The Kremlin has not yet commented on the publication of Corriere della Sera. It is known that Putin and Berlusconi had friendly relations; they often communicated in informal settings. Berlusconi condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but claimed that he had restored relations with Putin several months after it. The Russian president condoled the death of the Italian politician in 2023.