Pope wants to meet Putin, compares Ukraine war to Rwanda
VATICAN CITY, Holy See — Pope Francis said in an interview published Tuesday that he requested a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, while comparing the scale of the bloodshed to Rwanda's genocide.
The pontiff told Italy's Corriere Della Sera newspaper that he had sent a message to Putin around 20 days into the conflict saying that "I was willing to go to Moscow".
"We have not yet received a response and we are still insisting, though I fear that Putin cannot, and does not, want to have this meeting at this time," Francis said.
"But how is it possible to not stop such brutality? Twenty-five years ago, we lived through the same thing with Rwanda," he said.
About 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 20th century's biggest massacres.
The pope has repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and denounced a "cruel and senseless war" without mentioning Putin or Moscow by name.
"I'm not going to Kyiv for now. I feel I shouldn't go. I have to go to Moscow first, I have to meet Putin first," he said.
Francis also said Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a close Putin ally, "cannot become Putin's altar boy".
Dialogue with the Orthodox Church, which separated from the Catholic Church in 1054, is a priority of Francis's pontificate.
But since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the pope's calls for peace have contrasted with Kirill's defence of Putin's fight against Russia's "external and internal enemies".
'Barking of NATO'
Questioning the conflict's causes, the pope spoke of an "anger" in the Kremlin which could have been "facilitated" by "the barking of NATO at Russia's door".
The remark sparked a reaction in Poland where Education Minister Przemyslaw Czarnek said on public television: "For sure, many of us are taking our heads in our hands on hearing what the pope has said."
In the interview, the pope also addressed the pain in his knee that has forced him to cancel various public engagements in recent months.
"I have a torn ligament, I will undergo an intervention with infiltration, and we'll see," he said.
The Vatican would not say what the pontiff was being injected with or when, but a source told AFP the ligament problem was linked to chronic arthritis in his right knee.
Infiltration can involve injecting drugs directly into inflamed or damaged joints and has an immediate effect.
"I've been like this for a while, I can't walk," Francis told Corriere della Sera.
"Once upon a time, popes were carried on gestatorial chairs," he said, referring to the ancient shoulder-carried ceremonial throne on which popes were borne aloft until 1978.
He appeared to rule out reviving the throne.
"A bit of pain, of humility, is necessary," he said.
Francis told a newspaper in Argentina in April he was treating the torn ligament by putting ice on it and taking some painkillers.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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