The Pope’s special envoy for peace in Ukraine promised that “the Church will do everything possible to protect the lives of children” as civilians were caught amid intensified fighting in the south of the country.
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the Archbishop of Bologna, met Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubynets, on 5 June during his two-day peace mission to Kyiv, which was intended “to listen in depth to the Ukrainian authorities about possible ways to achieve a just peace and to support gestures of humanity that will help ease tensions”, the Vatican said.
Lubynets asked for the Church’s help in negotiating the return of the roughly 27,000 civilians he said were held captive by Russia, and said that 371 abducted Ukrainian children had been successfully returned.
“Perhaps with your participation, we will be able to change that number significantly,” he told Zuppi.
The cardinal said that it was “unacceptable” that the war should affect children and quoted Pope Francis’s words: “Your tears are my tears, your pain is my pain.”
He added: “I say that your children are our children. I can say this because many children have come to Italy...It was very pleasant to see the hospitality with which Italians welcomed Ukrainian children.”
Cardinal Zuppi’s visit also featured a visit to Bucha, the town north of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed hundreds of civilians early in their invasion last March.
The cardinal met President Volodymyr Zelenskiy the next day, as thousands of civilians were evacuated from their homes around the Dnipro River following the collapse of a dam in Russian-occupied territory.
The destruction of the Khakovka hydroelectric dam, which Ukrainians and Russians each blamed on the other’s sabotage, flooded a huge area of the Kherson region and left 700,000 people without drinking water.
Depaul International described it as a “humanitarian disaster”, as Depaul Ukraine’s chief executive, Fr Vitaliy Novak, reported that the charities Odesa team had been “inundated with calls from people urgently needing accommodation”.
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