ROME — Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk called for “zero tolerance” toward Russia on Tuesday, insisting Vladimir Putin aims at the total annihilation of the Ukrainian people.
“What is happening in Ukraine is not a conflict, it is a crime against humanity; there is a cruel criminal and there is an innocent victim,” Archbishop Shevchuk said in an interview with the Italian daily Il Foglio.
Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, denounced certain Western “misunderstandings” of the war, consisting in attempts to explain or justify the unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine.
“There are many opinions and debates going on as to why Russia has attacked Ukraine on a large scale, bringing destruction, suffering, and death to our country,” the archbishop said. “Ukraine has been a victim of Russian aggression since 2014 but since February 24 we Ukrainians have understood that this is not just a war of one country against another, much less a simple ‘military operation.’”
The ideology of the “Russian world” springs from religious fundamentalism and a form of radical nationalism “that intends to spread throughout the world,” Shevchuk said. “The ideology of the ‘Russian world’ denies the right of the Ukrainian people to exist, as the ideology of Nazi Germany once did with the Jewish people.”
“Unfortunately, in Russia today we can see a synthesis between the Soviet and the imperial mentality. And Ukraine today is the victim of this perverse reconstruction of the borders of ‘greater Russia,’” he said.
To justify its aggression, Russia tries to present Ukrainian society as part of the “collective West,” under the influence of “Western immorality,” the archbishop stated. “Precisely here arises an intolerance towards everything ‘that is not ours,’ provoking and justifying the use of violence to eliminate all the ‘contaminated.’”
“To evoke a historical memory of this enemy in order to wage war, the word ‘Nazism’ is used, a term that has lost any original meaning, and today is generally applied to all ‘Western things,’” he added.
“Hence, a Ukrainian is referred to as a Nazi-heretic. It is increasingly evident that Russia has entered into cultural conflict not only with Ukraine but with everything we define as Western civilization,” he said.
“The real goal of the Russian aggression is the annihilation of the Ukrainian people,” Shevchuk said. “This is confirmed by both the ideological speeches of Putin himself, in which reference is often made to Ukrainian history, and the war crimes committed by his soldiers on our land.”
The archbishop went on to insist that what is happening in Ukraine is more than just a war, and something other than a “conflict.”
“I see that lately the Western media are talking about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict,” he said. “There is no conflict in Ukraine. Because conflict always evokes a symmetrical paradigm of discourse; conflict means that there are two groups, each of which has its own reason, and they are in conflict.”
There is in fact no such kind of reality in Ukraine, he said. There are not two sides and with some middle truth. “There is a criminal, one who attacks, and there is his victim.”
“We must declare ‘zero tolerance’ towards the criminal,” he said. “I think we need to stop talking about the conflict, and instead talk about the war crime in Ukraine.”
“If the interest of a state provokes war and is condemning a people of more than 40 million to death, then it is no longer an interest, it is a crime,” he added.
It is also important to “find the right terms to describe everything that happens in Ukraine, because the word ‘war,’ as this word is commonly understood, is no longer able to describe this tragedy. If anyone has any doubts, I invite them to come to Ukraine and see for themselves.”
In his interview, Shevchuk also described the mass graves of civilians he has seen and the testimonies of the victims of rape perpetrated by Russian soldiers.
This photograph taken on July 15, 2022, shows recently made graves at a cemetery in the Vinogradnoe district, Donetsk region, amid the ongoing Russian military action in Ukraine. (AFP via Getty Images)
“Unfortunately, these are not individual cases but we see the systematic actions of Putin’s army at the expense of the innocent people of Ukraine,” he said, and mass graves “have been found in Bucha, Mariupol, and Makariv” as well as many cases of torture on civilians and also on children.
The archbishop also related how the Russian army constructed a torture chamber in the Orthodox church near the ancient city of Chernihiv. “In the church building they tortured people from the villages of Yahidne and Lukashivka,” he said, and many “mutilated bodies were found around the church.”
“Today it becomes more and more evident, at least for us in Ukraine, that the Russian war against Ukraine has a clear ideological structure called the ideology of the Russian world,” he said.
“War is not a game,” he insisted. “It seems to me that sometimes in the West people associate the word ‘war’ with electronic games. Unfortunately, those who plan wars have never known what a war really is. But seeing the reality of the war in Ukraine, we are dealing with total destruction.”
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