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The joint statement Francis signed with Kirill in 2016 is "totally obsolete" regarding Ukraine now that Russia has invaded its neighbor
By Yves Hamant | France
Pope Francis is a master at surprising people by doing things that go against normal protocols.
For instance, he left the Vatican on February 25 and went a few hundred meters away to the Russian Embassy to the Holy See, apparently to offer his mediation between Presidents Putin and Zelensky.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took the initiative in November 1961 when he sent a telegram to John XXIII to congratulate the pope on his 80th birthday. John replied and a form of relationship was established between the two men who best represented two opposing views of the world at the time.
When the Cuban missile crisis broke out between the USSR and the United States almost a year later, Pope John capitalized on this relationship and, through the two countries' ambassadors to the Holy See, pleaded with Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy to find a compromise.
The Soviet newspaper Pravda on October 25, 1962 even published the pope's appeal to the world's leaders to "save the peace".
An aggressor and a victim
The current configuration is radically different. It is not a question of a confrontation between two nuclear superpowers.
Indeed, what Vladimir Putin is aiming at is the ontological suppression of Ukraine. In his eyes, it is the very existence of Ukraine that is a provocation.
The joint declaration that Pope Francis and Russian Patriarch Kirill signed in 2016 in Havana addressed a very different scenario whereby Ukraine and Russia were seen as two countries on an equal footing. That is now totally obsolete.
This what that part of the statement said:
We deplore the hostility in Ukraine that has already caused many victims, inflicted innumerable wounds on peaceful inhabitants and thrown society into a deep economic and humanitarian crisis. We invite all the parts involved in the conflict to prudence, to social solidarity and to action aimed at constructing peace. We invite our Churches in Ukraine to work towards social harmony, to refrain from taking part in the confrontation, and to not support any further development of the conflict.
What can be asked of Ukraine now? To give up its existence as a sovereign state?
And with what guarantees?
Banishing the memory of Stalinism
We know that Putin constantly lies and that, in his eyes, the treaties he signs are binding only on their co-signatories.
He has already violated his obligations towards Ukraine three times over: the general obligations under international law to respect national borders, the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty (1997) and the Budapest Memorandum (1994).
Can we imagine Pope Francis blessing an unequal treaty whose effects would extend beyond Ukraine to the entire international order?
And in so doing, de facto admitting that entire populations around the world are under the oppression of a brutal dictatorial and police regime, making a mockery of individual rights and freedoms, preventing free elections, imprisoning, murdering and poisoning its opponents, and supporting governments guilty of war crimes (such as in Syria)?
In short, can we imagine that the pope would implicitly give his approval to such a regime, which systematically distorts reality, completely rewrites history and has gone so far as to banish the memory of Stalinism?
Yves Hamant is professor emeritus of the University of Paris X-Nanterre where he taught Russian and Soviet studies. He lived in Russia for several years during the Brezhnev era.
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