ROME — Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the Kremlin “very much appreciates the Vatican’s balanced line on the conflict in Ukraine” after Pope Francis came under fire for offering tribute to “great Mother Russia” over the weekend.
Relations between Russia and the Holy See are marked by “a mutually respectful and constructive approach,” Zakharova told the Italian news agency ANSA on Tuesday while blasting the “Kiev regime” for rebuffing the pope’s peace efforts.
Last Friday, the pontiff urged a group of young Russian Catholics to be worthy heirs of great Russia, “that Russian empire — great, enlightened, great culture and great humanity.”
“Never give up this legacy, you are the heirs of the great Mother Russia, go ahead with it,” he told them.
Ukrainian officials predictably denounced the pope’s words as “imperialist propaganda.”
Oleg Nikolenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said:
It’s a shame that Russian great-power ideas, which are the cause of Russia’s chronic aggression, consciously or unconsciously sound from the lips of the pope, whose mission, in our opinion, is precisely to open the eyes of Russian youth to the disastrous course of the current Russian leadership.
For his part, Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said the pope’s words about “the great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, of that empire — great and enlightened, a country of great culture and great humanity” touched on “the worst example of Russian imperialism and extreme nationalism.”
“We fear that those words are understood by some as an encouragement of precisely this nationalism and imperialism, which is the real cause of the war in Ukraine,” the archbishop said. “War that brings death and destruction to our people every day.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitrij Peskov told the state-run TASS news agency that Moscow welcomed the pope’s words.
“This is not the first time that Ukrainians have criticized Pope Francis for his aspirations for Russia,” Peskov said. “Previously, Kiev had rejected Francis’ proposals for mediation to achieve peace in Ukraine.”
“The pontiff knows Russian history, and that’s very positive,” he stated. “It is really deep and has deep roots. This legacy should be constantly passed on to our young people and must be remembered.”
