2024-03-11 12:58:38
CTK
Updated 5 hours ago
In an interview with a Swiss television station, Pope Francis did not call on Ukraine to surrender, but rather called for a ceasefire and the courage to start negotiations, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni explained on Sunday, according to the ANSA agency. In the aforementioned interview, the Pope spoke about the need to raise a “white flag”.
The interview is not to be broadcast until March 20, but the Reuters agency published part of it on Saturday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy objected to the pope’s statements in his evening speech on Sunday, and sharply defined and the head of Ukrainian diplomacy Dmytro Kuleba.
The Pope was asked in the interview about his position in the debate between those who say Ukraine should surrender because it is unable to expel Russian forces and those who say it would legitimize the right of the stronger. The interviewer used the term “white flag” in the interview. According to Reuters, the Pope responded by saying that “the strongest is the one who evaluates the situation, thinks about the people, has the courage to raise the white flag and acts”.
A Vatican spokesman noted that the Pope repeated the term “white flag” in response to a journalist’s question. “The Pope uses the term white flag, responding to the image evoked by the interviewer, to point to the cessation of violence and the truce achieved through the courage to negotiate,” Bruni said.
The Vatican spokesman also stressed that elsewhere in the interview the Pope said that “negotiation is never capitulation”.
Ukraine wants a peace plan first
“The Russians are not advancing through Europe only because Ukrainian men and women with guns in their hands and under a blue-yellow flag are preventing them from doing so,” Zelenskyy said in a speech in which he did not explicitly mention Pope Francis or his statements. “There used to be many white houses and churches in Ukraine, but now they are burned and destroyed by Russian projectiles. This says a lot about who should stop to end the war,” the president added.
Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Kuleba sharply criticized the pope’s statements on Sunday. “Our flag is yellow and blue. This is the flag under which we live, die and win. We should not hang any other flags,” he wrote on the social network X. Kuleba also said, in reference to the Pope’s, that “the strongest is the one who in in the fight between good and evil, he stands on the side of good and does not try to put both sides on the same level and call it action”.
So far, Ukraine rejects negotiations with the participation of Russia and claims that a peace plan needs to be drawn up first. Zelenskyy expressed himself in this sense after Friday’s meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In February, he said that he would like to organize a peace summit in Switzerland, where Ukraine, together with its partners, would develop such a plan and then present it to Russia.
The Pope’s words on Sunday were also condemned by the representatives of some European states. “In the face of evil, we must not capitulate, we must fight and defeat it, so that evil will raise the white flag and capitulate,” Latvian President Edgars Rinkévičs wrote.
“How about, for balance, giving courage to Putin to withdraw his army from Ukraine? Peace would come immediately, without the need for negotiations,” said Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, adding that such calls deny victims of aggression the ability to defend themselves.
The spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy, Marija Zakharova, told ANSA in response to the Pope’s statement that the Holy Father was not speaking to Kiev, but to the West. According to her, he uses Ukraine as a tool to fulfill his goals. “I understand that the Pope is calling on the West to give up its ambitions and admit that it was wrong,” ANSA quoted Zakharova as saying. Russia’s armed aggression against the neighboring country has been going on for over two years.