March 10, 2024
UkraineRejects Pope Francis calling for talks with Russia.
Ukraine rejects Pope Francis’s call to negotiate an end to the war with Russia, with President Zelenskiy saying the pontiff was engaging in “virtual mediation” and his foreign minister Kuleba saying Kyiv would never surrender.
Francis said that when things were going badly for a party to a conflict one had to show the “courage of the white flag” and negotiate.
- “They support us with prayer, with their discussion and with deeds. This is indeed what a church with the people is,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.” Not 2,500 km away, somewhere, virtual mediation between someone who wants to live and someone who wants to destroy you.”
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, writing on the X messaging platform, said that the strong person in any dispute “stands on the side of good rather than attempting to put them on the same footing and call it ‘negotiations’”.
- “Our flag is a yellow and blue one,” Kuleba wrote in English, referring to the Ukrainian national flag. “This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags.”
The head of Ukraine’s 5 million-strong Eastern Rite Catholic Church, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, also rejected the pope’s comments.
- “Ukraine is wounded, but not conquered! Ukraine is exhausted, but it stands and will stand!” the church’s website quoted Shevchuk as saying in New York. “Believe me, no one has any idea of surrendering.”
European officials supporting Ukraine in efforts to evict Russian troops denounced the pope’s latest comments.
- “How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine?” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on X.
Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics, also writing on X, said:
- “One must not capitulate in face of evil, one must fight it and defeat it, so that the evil raises the white flag and capitulates.”
