Pope Francis said in an interview published on May 3 that he has asked for a meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin to try to stop the war in Ukraine but had not received a reply.
The pontiff also told the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera that Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has given the war his backing, "cannot become Putin's altar boy."
Francis told the newspaper that about three weeks into the war, he asked the Vatican's top diplomat to send a message to Putin about setting up a meeting.
"We have not yet received a response and we are still insisting," the pope said.
He added: "I fear that Putin cannot, and does not, want to have this meeting at this time. But how can you not stop so much brutality?"
The pope has repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine and denounced a "cruel and senseless war" without mentioning Putin or Moscow by name.
"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," he said.
“Of course, it would be necessary for the leader of the Kremlin to make available some window of opportunity. But we still have not had a response and we are still pushing, even if I fear that Putin cannot and does not want to have this meeting at this moment,” Francis was quoted as saying by the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Francis also said Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a close Putin ally, "cannot become Putin's altar boy".
Francis recalled that he spoke in March with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, for 40 minutes by videoconference and for the first half “with paper in hand, he read all of the justifications for the war."
Dialogue with the Orthodox Church, which separated from the Catholic Church in 1054, is a priority of Francis's pontificate.
But since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the pope's calls for peace have contrasted with Kirill's defence of Putin's fight against Russia's "external and internal enemies".
Popes for decades have sought to visit Moscow as part of the longstanding effort to heal relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, which split with Rome more than 1,000 years ago. But an invitation has never been forthcoming.
“I listened and told him: ‘I don’t understand any of this. Brother, we are not clerics of the state, we cannot use language of politics, but that of Jesus. ... For this we need to find the paths of peace, to stop the firing of arms.’”
Francis has given a handful of interviews of late to friendly media emphasizing his call for an end to the war and initiatives to provide humanitarian relief to Ukrainians. He has defended his decision to not call out Putin or Russia publicly, saying popes don’t do so. But he freely named Putin in his remarks to Corriere, and seemed to equate the carnage in Ukraine with the genocide in Rwanda a quarter-century ago.
“Such brutality, how can you not try to to stop it? Twenty-five years ago in Rwanda we saw the same thing,” he was quoted as saying.
About 800,000 people were killed between April and July 1994 as the extremist Hutu regime tried to wipe out Rwanda's Tutsi minority, in one of the 20th century's biggest massacres.
