breaking latest news – The Orthodox and Catholic Churches can join forces to serve the cause of peace and justice: said the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill, who received in Moscow Pope Francis’ envoy for peace in Ukraine, cardinal Matteo Zuppi. “Churches can serve the cause of peace and justice with joint efforts,” he explained.
The patriarch, a close ally of Putin, also said he was “very happy” with the cardinal’s visit to Moscow: according to Kirill, “it is important that all the forces of the world unite to avoid a major armed conflict”.
Today’s meeting was eagerly awaited and comes after a long series of appeals from Pope Bergoglio to seek a space for mediation. But Kiev and Moscow are very distant and Zuppi, that he invited Kirill to visit Bologna and its Orthodox communityhas been invested with a mission of listening and goodwill by the pontiff, a first step towards a wider-ranging effort.
Before Kirill, the cardinal underlined the very strong interest of Pope Francis, “to know his opinion on the situation in which we find ourselves and on a possible meeting with him”.
The president of the CEI, who arrived in Moscow on Tuesday, was received yesterday by the adviser to the Russian presidency for international affairs, Yuri Ushakov. The face-to-face meeting did not lead to “concrete decisions or agreements”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reported, but the parties did “exchanged views and information on humanitarian issues in the context of Ukrainian affairs“.
The prospects for mediation are currently slim, given that on the one hand Russia insists that it is Kiev that does not want to negotiate and on the other it continues to reiterate that Zelensky must in any case accept the “real situation” on the ground, i.e. the annexation of the peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and that of the other four regions in Donbass in 2022.
On the other hand, President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Zuppi met three weeks ago in Kiev, never misses an opportunity to underline that he will not accept any cessation of hostilities that does not involve the Russian withdrawal from their territories.
This morning Zuppi had also met with the presidential commissioner for children’s rights in Russia, Maria Lvova-Belova. “I am sure that Christian love and mercy will help dialogue and mutual understanding“, said the Russian official. Both her and President Vladimir Putin have had an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court since March, which holds them responsible for the “war crime of illegal deportation” of Ukrainian children from the territories occupied by the Russians.
According to Kiev, more than 16,000 Ukrainian minors have been deported to Russia since the invasion began, many placed in institutions or orphanages. Moscow has always denied the accusations and claims it has “saved” the children from the fighting and wants to reunite them with their families. Lvova-Belova herself has adopted a Ukrainian child and has repeatedly argued that temporarily taking in “refugee” minors is not a war crime.
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