Russian ambassador to the Vatican Alexander Avdeev conveyed a protest over the Pope's statements published in America magazine about the cruelty of the Russian occupiers in Ukraine.
"On the evening of November 28, I made a presentation to the leadership of the Vatican diplomatic service, expressing outrage at the strange statements attributed to Pope Francis in his interview published on the America magazine portal, published in the United States," Avdeev said, according to the Russian media.
The representative of Russia noted that ”the unity of the multinational Russian people is unshakable, and no one will be able to question it."
At the request of an American journalist, Pope Francis explained in an interview with the Jesuit magazine "America" why he sometimes talks about Putin, Russia and its aggression against Ukraine in an implicit way.
"When I talk about Ukraine, I am talking about the martyr nation, martyr people. If there are martyr people, then there is one who torments them. When I talk about Ukraine, I talk about cruelty because I have a lot of information about the brutality of the invading troops. The most violent are probably those from Russia but do not belong to the Russian tradition, such as Chechens, Buryats, etc. Of course, the one who attacks is the Russian state. This is quite evident. Sometimes I try not to specify things so as not to offend but rather to condemn in general, although it is well-known who I am judging. One needs not to indicate the first and last name," the pontiff said.
He also compared Russia's war in Ukraine to the “terrible genocide” of the 1930s, organized by the Soviet government by the Holodomor.
As RISU reported, the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Maria Zakharova, said that Pope Francis' statements about the crimes of Russian military personnel in Ukraine are a "distortion of the truth."