Russian President Vladimir Putin was pushed into war with Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass and Russian media and people, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told Italian television.

The billionaire media mogul and old friend of Putin, who condemned the war, told Porta a Porta that the separatists came to Moscow and told the media that the Ukrainian attacks had caused 16.000 deaths and that Putin had done nothing to defend them.

"Putin was pushed by the Russian people, his party and his ministers to invent this special operation," the former prime minister said.

As reported by the Anessa agency, Berlusconi said that the Russian soldiers should have entered, arrived in Kyiv in a week, replaced Zelensky's government with decent people and returned to Russia. Instead, they encountered unexpected resistance, which was then fueled by weapons of all kinds from the West."

"The war has been going on for more than 200 days, the situation has become very difficult, I feel bad when I hear about the dead because I have always believed that war is the greatest madness of all things," concluded the former Italian prime minister.