Speaking to thousands of people in St. Peter's Square for his Regina Caeli prayers at noon on Sunday, Pope Francis described the war in Ukraine as a “macabre regression of humanity” that makes him “suffer and cry”.
He specifically referred to the port city of Mariupol, controlled by Russian forces apart from a contingent of an estimated 1,000 military and civilians besieged underground in the vast Azovstal steel works.
“I suffer and cry thinking of the suffering of the Ukrainian population, in particular the weakest, the elderly, the children,” Francis said, mentioning “terrible news of children who are being expelled and deported”. The Pope asked the faithful to pray the Rosary throughout the Marian month of May for peace in Ukraine.
Francis called for safe humanitarian corridors for those in the Azovstal steel works, and on Sunday some 100 civilians were evacuated with the co-operation of the UN and International Red Cross. However, the Ukrainian military said Russian troops resumed shelling the steel works after that group was evacuated.
Denys Shlega, a Ukrainian National Guard brigade commander, told Ukrainian TV that Russians on Sunday night started shelling the plant after a two-day break. “There are still hundreds of civilians including about 20 children in Azovstal’s bunkers, according to our calculations,” he said.
Although Francis did not mention Russia, his remarks were understood as aimed at Moscow. However, he also implicitly criticised all those promoting war rather than peace, an accusation that takes in the US, Britain and Nato, all heavily involved in sending weapons to Ukraine in what is seen by many as a proxy war between the West and Russia in which Ukrainians do the fighting and dying.
“While we are watching a macabre regression of humanity, I ask myself, along with many other anguished people if peace is really being searched for, if there really is a willingness to avoid a continuing military and verbal escalation, if everything is being done to silence the weapons,” Francis said.
At a 25 April press conference in southeastern Poland after visiting Kyiv US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asked about the United States goals in Ukraine. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” he said. That meant Russia should “not have the capability to very quickly reproduce” the forces and equipment that had been lost in Ukraine.
Two days later, in a speech at London’s Mansion House on 27 April, the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said: “We are doubling down. We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”
To force Russia out of Crimea and the Donbass would require UK, US and Nato military involvement on a scale that would escalate the conflict catastrophically. Meanwhile Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said Ukrainians have “a right to protect and defend themselves” by striking Russian territory.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, on 1 May sought to downplay state television rhetoric, in which one programme host warned that Russia could “sink” Britain “once and for all” with a nuclear missile strike. Lavrov claimed that “Western media misinterpret Russian threats” and that “Russia has never ceased its efforts to reach agreements that guarantee that a nuclear war never develops”.
On 29 April, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said that there have been 2,899 civilian deaths confirmed since the Russian invasion began on 24 February, but the actual number is believed to be much higher.
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