ROME — Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said Friday that in the face of a possible nuclear disaster, “Ukraine is protecting Europe and the world.”
In a video message marking the 65th day of “Russian war and aggression against Ukraine,” Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk chronicled Russia’s “intensified attacks” in the south and east of Ukraine, with bloody battles in the Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, and “a very massive missile strike on central Ukraine.”
Moreover, on Thursday the Secretary General of the United Nations was in Kyiv as an envoy of peace, and, yet, during his visit, Russians fired five rockets into the city center, the archbishop noted. “This is contempt for international institutions, contempt for international efforts to ensure justice and just peace in Ukraine.”
The archbishop commented on a statement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) explaining the great danger of missile strikes on nuclear power plants in Ukraine, which he stated “could be a major nuclear disaster, not only for Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, but also for the whole of Europe.”
“But Ukraine is standing. Ukraine is fighting. Ukraine is protecting Europe and the world from this danger, from this evil,” he said.
In his message, Shevchuk also reflected on the gospel beatitude “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
“Blessed are those who know how to tell right from wrong,” he declared. “Blessed are those who are hungry and thirsty for holiness and for the eternity that the Lord God gives us.”
Reflecting on this “hunger and thirst for justice in the context of the war in Ukraine, today we see blatant injustice towards our nation,” he stated.
This injustice is not just a lack of respect for the dignity of the human person but plunges into the very identity of the Ukrainian people, he asserted, by denying their existence as a people.
“Recently, our enemies received a certain textbook on the genocide of the Ukrainian people where it says that Ukrainians as a people do not exist,” he said. “Ukrainians are not a people, they are not a nation, they are an ideology, and even a Western ideology.”
“And those who do not want to abandon this ideology, who want to preserve their national identity as a Ukrainian, they must either be killed — and hence the genocidal consequences of this militant ideology — or they need to be re-educated in concentration camps,” he added.
“Our people are thus doomed to be ruled by an unjust attacker,” he declared.
And that is why today Ukrainians experience a special thirst for justice, he said, because justice between nations “depends on the truth of our coexistence.”