2022-11-07T15:47:00+02:00 Politics 2024-09-15T06:16:50+03:00

Ukrainian news

Pope Francis Does Not Believe In Cruelty Of Russians

Pope Francis Does Not Believe In Cruelty Of Russians

Pope Francis does not believe in the cruelty of Russians towards the Ukrainian people and considers them a "great people."

This was reported by Vatican News, Ukrainian News Agency reports.

"What strikes me – that's why I use the word 'tormented' for Ukraine – is the cruelty, which is not of the Russian people, perhaps... because the Russian people are a great people. It is of the mercenaries, of the soldiers who go off to war as an adventure, mercenaries... I prefer to think of it this way because I have high esteem for the Russian people, for Russian humanism,” the pontiff said.

The Pope mentioned the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, who, according to him, is now "inspiring Christians to think of Christianity.

“I have great affection for the Russian people and I also have great affection for the Ukrainian people,” he added.

The ambassador of Ukraine to the United States Oksana Markarova reacted to Francis's words. She suggested that the Pope was reading Dostoevsky without attention.

"Sorry, I won't hold back. The Pope, apparently, once read Dostoevsky without attention. Otherwise, His Holiness would not be surprised by the rigidity of the Russians (which is just natural to them). And several other works of Russian writers/poets, including Pushkin, Kuprin, Bulgakov, as well as even a superficial study of the true history of our region, show that there was no humanism in Muscovy either under Ivan the Terrible in 1547 or in 1708, when Baturin was brutally cut, or in every event after that," she wrote.

Also, the head of the Lviv Regional Military Administration Maksym Kozytskyi reacted sharply to the pontiff's statement.

He stressed that Russian soldiers who kill Ukrainians are representatives of the Russian people.

"Where then do they have such cruelty to Ukrainians from if cruelty is not peculiar to the Russian people?" Kozytskyi wrote on his Telegram channel.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, in August, the Vatican distributed communiques on the statements of Pope Francis about the war in Ukraine.

The Holy See press service notes that the Pope does not take a political position, and emphasizes that Russia began the war in Ukraine.

On August 24, the Pope spoke about the war in Ukraine and mentioned the Russian propagandist Daria Dugina, who died in the Moscow Region in a car explosion on August 20.

He stated that Dugina was an "innocent" victim of war.