A senior Vatican official has warned that Ukraine will need “far-reaching reform” regardless of the “Russian aggression” that it is experiencing.
“Ukraine is just now playing catch-up in addressing the repair or removal of servitude structures from its Soviet communist past, which other countries in Central and Eastern Europe were able to address and at least begin to change almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Archbishop Thomas Gullickson, the Holy See’s nuncio in Kiev. “Much of the current destabilisation is attributable to the depredation carried out and still continuing at the hands of Ukraine’s own criminal oligarchy, exacerbated by Russian aggression against its territorial integrity and sovereignty.”
In an address to the Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, the US-born nuncio said Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church was at risk in all parts of Ukraine if Russia seizes power “but even if Russian aggression ended tomorrow, apart from rebuilding the east, Ukraine would still face enormous challenges in rooting out corruption and establishing a just society”.
Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox leader Patriarch Kirill of Moscow told an annual “Dialogue of Civilisations” in Rhodes that the Ukrainian crisis was a political confrontation that had now “escalated into a fratricidal war”, and he accused Ukrainians of persecuting his Church. Ukrainian government and church leaders have vigorously rejected such claims.
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