Olga Nesterova

A new split has emerged inside the European Union over how to finance Ukraine’s budget in the coming years, after Italy, Belgium, Malta, and Bulgaria jointly urged Brussels to slow down on its flagship plan to use frozen Russian state assets as collateral for large-scale loans to Kyiv.

An in-depth conversation with Ambassador Maurizio Massari, Italy’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, on diplomacy, multilateral reform, gender equality, the UN’s role in Ukraine, and Italy’s vision for the future of global cooperation.

As Washington recalibrates its global strategy and Tokyo accelerates its security reforms, the U.S.–Japan alliance now faces a defining test: whether it can maintain coherence and trust in an era of heightened geopolitical volatility — or whether political dissonance at the top will undermine one of the Indo-Pacific’s most essential stabilizing pillars.