In an interview on Tuesday, Pope Francis said he requested a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine.
Pope Francis (File photo: Reuters)
Pope Francis said in an interview published on Tuesday that he requested a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, while comparing the scale of the bloodshed to the Rwandan genocide.
The pontiff told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper that he had sent a message to Putin about 20 days into the conflict saying “I was ready to go to Moscow”.
“We have not received a response yet and we are still insisting, although I fear that Putin cannot and does not want to have this meeting at this time,” Francis said.
“But how is it possible to stop this kind of cruelty? Twenty-five years ago, we lived through the same thing with Rwanda,” he said.
Some 800,000 people were killed between April and July 1994 as the extremist Hutu regime tried to wipe out Rwanda’s Tutsi minority in one of the largest genocide of the 20th century.
The pope has repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and condemned a “brutal and senseless war” without naming Putin or Moscow.
“I am not going to Kyiv for now. I think I should not. I have to go to Moscow first, I have to meet Putin first,” he said.
Francis also said that Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a close ally of Putin, “could not be Putin’s altar boy”.
Communion with the Orthodox Church, which split from the Catholic Church in 1054, is the priority of the Pontifical of Francis.
But since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the pope’s call for peace has contrasted with Kirill’s defense of Putin’s fight against Russia’s “external and internal enemies.”