Italian paper La Verita, which published the key evidence leading to the arrest of Katica Janeva, reports on Zoran Zaev’s visit to Italy where he met Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte and outgoing EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

La Verita notes that Conte assured Zaev of Italy’s support for Macedonia’s EU accession, but that it means little, given that Italy is also opposed to the decoupling of Macedonia from Albania.

Keeping the enlargement prospects of Skopje and Tirana alive is part of the political decisions and deals made by the Renzi and Gentiloni governments over the past years. These deals were implemented with the actions of Federica Mogherini. In fact, it was the deals between Renzi and Albanian Prime Minister Rama, supported by Obama, that allowed Zaev to grab power in Macedonia in 2017 in violation of its Constitution by securing him the support of the Albanian DUI party. This was enabled with the Tirana platform, twice rejected by President Ivanov, which leads to the de-nationalization of the Macedonian state, a process done by Zaev’s social-democratic government which is directly blackmailed by Rama. Conte said that Europe, due to the French veto, made a historic mistake and the diplomatically let Zaev know that Itlay will certainly support the re-opening of this process at the next European Council, but its outcome will be the same given the demand to maintain the package with Albania, La Verita reports in an article by its editor Laris Gaiser.

Italy was the strongest proponent of keeping Macedonia tied up with Albania. This meant that on top of the French veto for the opening of accession talks with both countries, Macedonia also faced the Dutch veto which applied only to Albania, but after the countries were promoted as a package, applied to Macedonia by default.

Gaiser says that the move by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, who refused to meet Pendarovski during his visit in Tirana, was meant to show who’s the boss in this relationship. Pendarovski briefly pushed for decoupling from Albania, and Rama apparently has not forgotten this.