Pope Francis has said he has requested to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. “I’m not going to Kyiv for now. I feel I shouldn’t go. I have to go to Moscow first, I have to meet Putin first,” the pope said.
The pontiff said that he had sent a message of “I was willing to go to Moscow” to Mr Putin within 20 days of the invasion. “We have not yet received a response and we are still insisting, though I fear that Putin cannot, and does not, want to have this meeting at this time,” Francis said.
“But how is it possible to not stop such brutality? Twenty-five years ago, we lived through the same thing with Rwanda,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russia on 24th February launched the war on Ukraine. And, according to the latest updates, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has confirmed 156 people who were successfully evacuated from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol arrived in Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday. Another 200 civilians were still trapped under the complex and approximately 100,000 remained in the city, said Mariupol’s mayor, Vadym Boichenko. Russian troops continued to shell and attempted to storm the Azovstal steelworks in violation of ceasefire agreements, the president said. Four humanitarian corridors are planned from Mariupol to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday “if the safety situation allows”, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, has announced. However, Russian attacks in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region killed 21 civilians and injured 27 on Tuesday, according to the regional governor.