ROME, Italy— There are no good guys and bad guys in the Ukraine war and Russia could have been “provoked” into invading Ukraine, Pope Francis said in an interview published Wednesday.

To understand the Russia-Ukraine war, “we have to get away from the normal pattern of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’: Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad guy. Here there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys, in the abstract,” the pontiff told the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica on May 19.

The pope went on to suggest that NATO shares some of the blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He cited an unnamed “very wise” head of state who told Francis prior to the war that he was “very concerned about the way NATO was acting.”

“They are barking at the gates of Russia. And they don’t understand that the Russians are imperial and they will not allow any foreign power to approach them. The situation could lead to war,” the anonymous leader allegedly said.

A local resident walks next to a house destroyed in a Russian shelling in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, Wednesday, May 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Andriy Andriyenko)

The Russians could have been “provoked” into invading Ukraine, the pontiff contended, and arms dealers also share some responsibility for stirring up the conflict.

A car drives past a burnt Russian tank on a road west of Kyiv, on April 7, 2022, during Russia’s military invasion launched on Ukraine. (GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)

“What we are seeing is the brutality and ferocity with which this war is being carried out by the troops, generally mercenaries, used by the Russians,” Francis said. “The Russians prefer to send in Chechen and Syrian mercenaries.”

But “the danger is that we only see this, which is monstrous, and we do not see the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented,” he asserted. “And note the interest in testing and selling weapons. It is very sad, but at the end of the day that is what is at stake.”

These statements do not mean the pope is “pro-Putin,” he declared, but he is “against reducing complexity to the distinction between good guys and bad guys without reasoning about roots and interests, which are very complex.”

“While we see the ferocity, the cruelty of Russian troops, we must not forget the real problems if we want them to be solved,” he said.

“What is before our eyes is a situation of world war, global interests, arms sales and geopolitical appropriation, which is martyring a heroic people,” he asserted.