ROME, Italy — Pope Francis warns in a new book that Russia’s war on Ukraine risks evolving into World War III and we are “moving towards it as if it were unavoidable.”

On Wednesday, Vatican News published an advance copy of the introduction to the pontiff’s book Against War: The Courage to Build Peace, which will hit Italian bookstores on April 14, in which Francis sharply criticizes war and the arms trade.

The many wars taking place around the world seemed distant to us, he writes, until now, “almost suddenly, war has broken out near us. Ukraine has been attacked and invaded.”

Among the affected in the conflict are “many innocent civilians, many women, many children, many elderly people, forced to live in shelters dug in the belly of the earth to escape the bombs, with families that are divided because the husbands, fathers, grandfathers remain to fight, while the wives, mothers and grandmothers seek refuge” in other countries.

As on other occasions, the pope pulls no rhetorical punches in his denunciation of war and national defense spending.

“War is not the solution, war is madness, war is a monster, war is a cancer that feeds off itself, engulfing everything!” he asserts. “More so, war is a sacrilege, that wreaks havoc on what is most precious on our earth, human life, the innocence of the little ones, the beauty of creation.”

The war in Ukraine is “yet another barbarity,” he declares. “War disrupts everything, it is pure madness, its only goal is destruction and it develops and grows through destruction, and if we had memory, we would not spend tens, hundreds of billions of dollars for rearmament, to equip ourselves with increasingly sophisticated weapons.”

What the world needs, he insists, is a “far-sighted politics capable of building a new system of coexistence that is no longer based on weapons, on the power of weapons, on deterrence.”

Who could have imagined that “the specter of a nuclear war would be looming over Europe?” he asks. “And so, step by step, we are moving towards catastrophe.”

“Piece by piece the world risks becoming the theater of a unique Third World War,” he states. “We are moving towards it as if it were unavoidable.”

“But we must forcefully repeat: no, it is not inevitable! No, war is not inescapable!” he adds.

Together, he states, “we must commit ourselves to building a world that is more peaceful because it is more just, where peace triumphs, not the folly of war; justice, not the injustice of war; mutual forgiveness, not the hatred that divides and makes us see an enemy in the other, in those who are different from us.”

The pope also reiterates his conviction that wars could be brought to an end by eliminating military spending, declaring that “wars must be stopped and they will only be stopped if we stop ‘fueling’ them.”