The Vatican does not consider the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas to be a “civil clash,” the Catholic city-state’s secretary for relations with states, Paul Richard Gallagher, told Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency.
In the interview with TASS, Gallagher, an English bishop in the Catholic Church, said that the Holy See supports efforts to resolve the conflict, which has raged since Russia invaded the region in 2014 and taken over 14,000 lives.
The Holy See “supports the implementation of the achieved agreements and the activity of all involved sides. The Holy See refrains from public accusations of involved sides,” he told TASS. “But it does not mean that it does accept the interpretations of the interested sides. The Holy See also does not consider it right to call the conflict in Eastern Ukraine a civil clash.”
As the Ukrainian armed forces have struggled against a mix of local militants backed by Russia and, at times, Russian regular troops in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the Russian government and pro-Kremlin media have attempted to portray the conflict as a civil war. Ukraine flatly rejects that characterization because of Russia’s direct involvement in provoking the conflict and supporting the militants.
In his interview with TASS, Gallagher said that, under Pope Francis, the Vatican had provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Any involvement by the Vatican in Ukraine aims to inspire the participants in the conflict to achieve “the much desired peace,” Gallagher added.
Since 2014, Ukraine has been negotiating with Russia to end the war and regain control over the entirety of the Donbas in two formats: the Minsk peace talks, which feature the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as a mediator, and the Normandy Format, which includes the leaders of France and Germany. Both negotiation platforms have delivered only limited results and peace talks over the Donbas have largely stalled.
Read more: Ukraine’s frustration grows with OSCE as peace-talks mediator
While Ukraine is a majority Orthodox Christian country, it has a long-standing Catholic minority, particularly in its west.
Ukrainian Catholics belong to several different denominations: the Roman Catholic Church’s Archdiocese of Lviv; the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, based in Kyiv; the Armenian Catholic Archdiocese of Lviv; and the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church’s Eparchy of Mukachevo.
