Sunday, after his first Sunday mass as head of the Roman Catholic church, Pope Leo XIV met the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who marked the opportunity with a gift: an image of the Madonna and the child painted on a wooden panel of an artillery box used on the fronts of his war against Russia.
“For many peoples, the image of a mother with a child is a symbol of life that must be protected. Today, we presented to Pope Leo XIV with a special icon –The mother of God with the babyPainted on a fragment of a box of heavy artillery weapons, “wrote Zelensky on Telegram.” These are our children. About those who suffered from the war, which Russia deliberately kidnapped and expelled, and that they expect a lot from them, in Ukraine. »»
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Three years after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the two nations do not seem closer to a cease-fire. This week, following a telephone call between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladmir Putin, Trump announced that his administration would not pressure Russia immediately to call war, which, in March 2025, was going to have cost the life of at least 150,000 Ukrainians and 100,000 Russian soldiers, according to figures published by kyiv and the United Nations. According to the Washington PostTrump said Zelenskyy and Putin are expected to manage negotiations themselves in a political reprimand to Ukraine allies in the European Union, some of which have called on Trump administration to sanction Russia.
In his first Sunday speech, Pope Leo called for “authentic, fair and lasting peace” in Ukraine. The supreme pontiff would have proposed to organize peace talks from the broker between Russia and Ukraine in the Vatican. “The Holy See is always ready to help collect enemies, face to face, to speak to each other,” he said, as quoted by the New York Times.
Earlier this month, the European Union (EU) published a new series of sanctions against Russia and, in a first, included on the list a museum-the Tauric State Museum of Cheronse-Preserve, on the outskirts of the city of Sébastopol in Crimea. Its museum director, Elena Morozova, was also sanctioned.
“Since the annexation of Crimea, the museum has actively undermined the Ukrainian cultural heritage by promoting pro-Russian accounts concerning the cultural importance of artifact and excavation sites it administers,” said the EU in the sanctions document. “After the large-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the museum used its platform to promote the invasion and the actors who committed it, in particular by organizing deliveries of supplies to the fronts.”
Last year, Ukrainian cultural officials accused Russia of having transformed the Tauric dearonesse, an ancient city founded by the Greeks in the 5th century BC and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2013, in a “historic and archaeological park”. The site includes a Russian Orthodox monastery and several institutions, including a museum of Christianity and the Crimean and Novorossiya museum (the Russian term for the territories annexed in Crimea).
Ukraine has an oriental Orthodox population, with around 70% of the Orthodox Christian Church, which is a distinct entity of the Catholic Church and is not liable to its direction. In 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church separated from the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow, a decision fueled by old millennial disagreements on canon law and modern geopolitical tensions linked to the annexation of Crimea.
In his statement, Zelenskyy thanked Pope Leo and the Catholic Church “for his desire to serve as a platform for direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia”, and shared these hopes “for dialogue in any format that leads to real results”.
