Former Italy PM Silvio Berlusconi wanted Putin to defuse India-Pakistan standoff

Italia’s former leader Silvio Berlusconi suggested to world leaders in 2002 that Russian president Vladimir Putin could be used to broker peace between India and Pakistan, according to the UK’s now-revealed confidential papers.

Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister at the time, put forth the idea at a lunch organised for world leaders at the Nato-Russia Council in May of that year.

His suggestion came when India and Pakistan amassed troops on their border as tensions heightened between the Asian neighbours, the papers released by the National Archives revealed.

But the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice dismissed as “a terrible idea” Berlusconi’s suggestion that other NATO leaders should join Putin.

Sir David Manning, British prime minister Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, said: “Condi Rice commented to me that this was ‘a terrible idea’ that could only complicate our efforts to handle the crisis.”

The India-Pakistan stand-off, following a terror attack on India’s parliament in 2001, threatened to escalate into a war between the two nuclear powers.

The newly released files also show Blair gifted silver cufflinks to Putin on his birthday.

Blair described Putin as a “Russian patriot” and advocated that the West should take him on board.

At a meeting with vice-president Dick Cheney at Camp David, Blair said “it was better to allow Putin a position on the top table and encourage Putin to reach for western attitudes as well as the western economic model”.

A Downing Street memo in January 2001 summarises Blair's contacts with Putin, who had become Russia’s president less than a year earlier.

It says: "On NATO, Putin told the Prime Minister in Moscow that he did not want to be viewed as anti-NATO and would not try to slow down the process of NATO enlargement".

However, the Russian defence minister Igor Sergeyev told his Nato counterparts any further expansion of the US-led military alliance would be a political error and his country would “take appropriate steps” in response.