Italian state media reporter apologizes over Nazi SS broadcast

The Rai News 24 journalist recently interviewed a Ukrainian serviceman who was wearing SS insignia

The Italian journalist who recently interviewed a Ukrainian soldier wearing Nazi insignia has apologized.

Ilario Piagnerelli, a reporter with the Italian state broadcaster Rai News 24, said he “deeply regrets” the interview but called the uproar on social media a tool of pro-Russian propaganda.

In an extract from a report circulating online, Piagnerelli can be seen talking to a man wearing a khaki cap adorned with the insignia of the ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ SS division, a unit that was convicted of war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunal following World War II. The video is watermarked ‘Rai News 24’. As of Monday morning, however, the footage was no longer visible on Piagnerelli’s X account. 

Sono cresciuto con un nonno partigiano, di quelli veri, che oggi non avrebbero dubbi nel distinguere tra invaso e invasore, tra chi resiste e chi occupa. Sono stato educato ai valori della Costituzione.

Mi rammarico profondamente di aver dato voce, anche se per pochi secondi, a… pic.twitter.com/lBhBTtlax6

— Ilario Piagnerelli (@ilario82) August 19, 2024

“I deeply regret having given voice, even if only for a few seconds, to a Ukrainian soldier who I only noticed wearing a patch with a Nazi symbol after the report aired,” Piagnerelli wrote on X on Monday.

“I grew up with a partisan grandfather, one of the real ones, who today would have no doubts in distinguishing between invader and invaded, between those who resist and those who occupy. I was educated in the values of the Constitution.” 

Piagnerelli further talked about an alleged “network of pro-invasion profiles linked to Moscow in Italy, which dedicates its resources to discrediting my work and that of other correspondents. They pretend to be shocked, but they have found in that image a formidable argument for anti-Ukrainian propaganda,” the reporter argued. 

Russian Foreign Ministry has accused Rai News 24 of “sinking to a new low,” with spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying that “the Western media continue to engage in the deliberate rehabilitation of Ukrainian neo-Nazis and a revision of the Nuremberg Tribunal verdicts.” 

Piagnerelli had already “distinguished himself with stories about Bucha and a dead neo-Nazi from Pravy Sektor [Right Sector],” Zakharova claimed, but has now “sunk to new depths ...” 

“It is possible that next time Piagnerelli will film a Ukronazi with the symbols of the SS division ‘Reichsfuhrer SS,’” Zakharova stated, referring to a unit notorious for carrying out what is claimed to be the worst World War II massacre in Western Europe.

Over the weekend, RAI recalled two of its reporters back to Italy after Moscow launched a criminal probe into their illegal presence in Russia’s Kursk Region. On Wednesday, the broadcaster aired a TV report on the Ukrainian cross-border assault into the region in which a crew of journalists embedded with Kiev’s forces drove deep into Russian territory.