ROME — The war going on in Ukraine reflects “imperialisms in conflict,” Pope Francis said in an interview published this week.
“There is a war going on and I think it is a mistake to think that this is a cowboy movie where there are good guys and bad guys,” the pontiff told his fellow Jesuits during his recent trip to Kazakhstan.
Pope Francis and Metropolitan Anthony, in charge of foreign relations for the Russian Orthodox Church, attend the ‘7th Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, Sep. 14, 2022 (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko).
“It is also a mistake to think that this is a war between Russia and Ukraine and no more. No, this is a world war,” he declared.
The pope went on to say that the victim of the conflict is Ukraine, while reiterating his belief that Russia was provoked into invading because “NATO had gone barking at the gates of Russia without understanding that the Russians are imperial and fear border insecurity.”
“War is like a marriage, in a way,” Francis asserted. “To understand it, one has to investigate the dynamics that developed the conflict. There are international factors that contributed to provoking the war.”
One “cannot be simplistic in reasoning about the causes of the conflict. I see imperialisms in conflict,” he said. “And, when they feel threatened and in decline, the imperialisms react, thinking that the solution is to unleash a war to make up for it, and also to sell and test weapons.”
The pope’s recent comments on the war echo his reflections from last May, where he similarly stated that to understand the conflict, “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,” he said at the time.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin(Photo by AFP) (Photos LUDOVIC MARIN, GINTS IVUSKANS, ALEXANDER NEMENOV, JOHN THYS/AFP via Getty Images)
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.”
These statements do not mean the pope is “pro-Putin,” he said, adding that he is “against reducing complexity to the distinction between good guys and bad guys without reasoning about roots and interests, which are very complex.”
“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 declared.