UKRAINE’s Greek Catholic Primate has accused President Putin of devaluing new peace appeals from the Pope by stepping up Russian air assaults on Kyiv and Odesa.
“The whole world paid attention to a telephone conversation between the Russian president and Pope Leo XIV, during which the Holy Father asked Russia to give some sign of peace, of readiness to end this senseless war,” Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said in a Pentecost message at the weekend.
“And on the night of 6 June, Russia gave such a sign — a terrible, murderous sign, attacking Ukraine with more than 400 ship- and land-based ballistic missiles and a large number of drones . . . This was a sign of further escalation, of contempt for everything we understand by the holy word peace.”
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church leader was responding to a new wave of overnight Russian missile and drone strikes which continued this week against his country. The attacks intensified after President Putin’s telephone talks last week with President Trump and Pope Leo, both of whom sought to bring the Russian ruler closer to peace negotiations.
The Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said that the Pope had promoted humanitarian needs, aid deliveries, and prisoner exchanges with President Putin, and had urged Russia “to make a gesture that would promote peace”.
He said that Pope Leo had thanked Patriarch Kirill of Moscow for the message at the start of his pontificate in May, and had “emphasised how common Christian values can be a light to help seek peace, defend life, and seek genuine religious freedom”.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Tass news agency reported that Mr Putin had “reiterated his interest in achieving peace”, and had asked the Vatican to “step up efforts to promote religious freedom in Ukraine”, in an apparent reference to current legal moves involving the country’s Moscow-linked Orthodox Church.
Speaking last Friday during a visit to Belarus, Patriarch Kirill said that he also supported prisoner exchanges, “even in a war being waged in the name of noble goals”, and also favoured a further “development of relations” with the Roman Catholic Church.
In his Pentecost message, however, Archbishop Shevchuk said that fighting was now taking place “on the entire front line”, forcing border evacuations and “a new wave of refugees”, compounded by new Russian strikes on Ukraine’s cities.
“The past week was full of pain, blood, tears, and fire, bringing new dead, missing and wounded,” he said. His 11th-century St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, a UNESCO world heritage site, was damaged by a Russian attack on Monday evening.
