ROME — Pope Francis said both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war suffer from “madness,” an affirmation that provoked a sharp rebuke from Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See.
Despite his continued prayers for “the beloved Ukrainian people who for six months today have been suffering the horror of war,” the pontiff suggested Wednesday that both sides of the conflict bear some share of the blame.
“I think of so much cruelty, so many innocents who are paying for madness, the madness of all sides, because war is madness and no one in war can say: ‘No, I am not mad.’ The madness of war,” he said following his weekly general audience in the Vatican.
As examples of this two-sided madness, the pope cited “that poor girl blown up by a bomb under her car seat in Moscow” as well as the “many Ukrainian children and Russian children who have become orphans.”
File/In this Friday, Feb. 12, 2016 file photo, Pope Francis, left, reaches to embrace Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill after signing a joint declaration at the Jose Marti International airport in Havana, Cuba. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, Pool)
“And being an orphan has no nationality, they have lost their father or their mother, whether they are Russian or Ukrainian,” he declared.
In response, Andrii Yurash, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See, expressed his consternation over Francis’ apparent assertion of moral equivalence between the two parties.
The pope’s words were “disappointing,” Yurash declared, by seeming to equate “aggressor & victim, rapist and raped.”
The Ukrainian representative also insisted that the little girl in Moscow was killed by the Russians themselves as a “sacred victim” and a “shield of war.”
The pope’s words Wednesday were reminiscent of a similar comment he made last May, when he asserted that there are no “good guys and bad guys” in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
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,” Francis said.
At that time, the pope also shared his belief that Russia could have been “provoked” by NATO into invading Ukraine and that arms dealers also share some responsibility for stirring up the conflict.
These comments also drew criticism from Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who responded that the causes of the war “lie within Russia itself,” rejecting the pope’s thesis that external factors “provoked” Russia to act.
The light of the Holy Spirit is especially necessary today “for those who are trying to understand the causes and consequences of this full-scale Russian aggression,” Archbishop Shevchuk said. “Because we see that today the whole world is trying to deceive, to pretend that what is desired is real.”