Pope Francis called on Wednesday to “avert the risk of a nuclear disaster” in Ukraine six months after the start of the Russian invasion, once again denouncing the “madness of war”. “For six months today, the Ukrainian people have been suffering from the horror of war,” the pope said, asking “that concrete steps be taken to put an end to the war and avert the risk of a nuclear disaster in Zaporizhia”.
“War is madness”
Several countries have expressed their fears of a disaster in the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, occupied since the beginning of March by the Russian army in the south of the country and the target of recurrent bombardments. “I am thinking of all this cruelty, of all these innocent people who pay for the madness of all parties, because war is madness,” said the Argentine sovereign pontiff after his weekly general audience at the Vatican, while the Ukraine marks the 31st anniversary of its independence from the former USSR on Wednesday.
“I think of this unfortunate young woman who died because of a bomb under the seat of her car in Moscow,” he added, referring to Daria Douguina, a 29-year-old journalist and political scientist and daughter of a ultra-nationalist philosopher and writer, killed on Saturday in the explosion of the vehicle she was driving.
“I think of the children”
This sentence provoked a rare reaction from the Ukrainian ambassador to the Holy See Andriï Yourach who judged in a tweet the pope’s speech “disappointing”. “We cannot speak in the same categories of aggressor and victim, rapist and raped. How is it possible to mention one of the ideologues of Russian imperialism as an innocent victim?” he writes. François also asked the authorities “to take measures for the release” of the prisoners.
“I think of the children. So many dead, and so many refugees. So many wounded. So many Ukrainian and Russian children have become orphans. Orphans have no nationality: they have lost a father or a mother, they are Russian or Ukrainian.” “Those who profit from war (…) are criminals who murder humanity,” the pope concluded.
For his part, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said he “hoped, until yesterday (Tuesday), that the decision to allow UN inspectors access to the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant would be another positive sign” . “Unfortunately, last night Russian missiles bombarded the area around the plant and therefore I can only associate myself with the words of the Holy Father so that a nuclear catastrophe is avoided,” he said during of a speech in Rimini (north).