ROME — Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk condemned “Russia’s attack on our homeland” Friday, urging continued resistance to the unjust “occupiers.”

“Ukraine is standing. Ukraine is fighting” and “Ukraine is bleeding,” Archbishop Shevchuk declared in a video message, while reporting on the “very heavy, bloody battles” being fought in the east of Ukraine, in the Luhansk region, in the east of the Kharkiv region, in the Donetsk region, and near the “martyred city of Mariupol.”

“We see more and more that this war is, in fact, a war of total annihilation,” the archbishop insisted. “We see how our occupiers, those who are capturing towns and villages, abuse the civilian population.”

Along with its direct attacks on civilians, Russia is “trying to destroy the railway tracks in advance, the roads on which people could be evacuated from dangerous areas,” he added.

Russian forces “seized and confiscated for their needs the humanitarian cargo that our volunteers were trying to deliver” to the people in need, he noted, including those who are “on the verge of starvation.”

In his message, Shevchuk reported that he had personally visited “the tragically infamous town of Bucha, which is an open wound on the body of Ukraine,” where he witnessed “the open mass grave” and the “lifeless bodies.”

A woman walks amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Sunday, April 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

As Christians, loving one’s neighbor means feeling related to him, the archbishop stated, and realizing that “where he or she rests in the mass grave, I could have been laid to rest there as well.”

This also means that all Christians, in solidarity with those who suffer unjustly, must today be one with Ukraine, he said.

Therefore, “every Christian, no matter where he lives on earth, whether he is Italian or German or Australian, seeing the atrocities of the occupiers in Bucha, says today: ‘I am Ukrainian,’” he said.

Because of the unity in our human race with those innocent victims, “the occupier is waging war against you and me, to put us in that mass grave tomorrow,” he added.

In this case, to love one’s enemy “means to stop his murderous hand, to take away his weapon, not to give him the opportunity to kill,” he declared.

In his address, the archbishop closed with a prayer, asking for God’s protection of the Ukrainian people.

“O God, stop the aggressor, stop this war, and give life to your people. Bless our Ukrainian army! Bless our homeland!” he said.