Has peace a chance? Vatican diplomacy and the war in Ukraine

Is there any role for the Pope in helping to end the war in Ukraine?

The horror of the war in Ukraine continues to grip the world. Cities are being shelled, children are being killed and more than two million people have already been forced to flee their homes. The threat of a full-blown nuclear conflict looms perilously close. While there is intense anguish, grief and fury, global statesmanship is in short supply. A ceasefire looks increasingly remote.

Amid the darkness, Pope Francis may offer a glimmer of hope. Last Sunday, speaking to the crowds in St Peter’s Square, he said the Holy See is “ready to do everything” to bring about peace. The Pope’s offer is being taken seriously. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Cardinal Parolin and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, spoke by phone.

The Vatican has long experience in mediating conflicts. Francis has helped to normalise relations between the United States and Cuba, smoothed the path to elections in the Central African Republic and brought together the warring leaders of South Sudan. Much of this work happens behind the scenes. On Ash Wednesday – the day the Pope had asked Christians to offer their fasting and prayer for peace in Ukraine – I sat down with Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, the papal ambassador to Britain, to find out how the Holy See is working to try to broker peace in Ukraine. How, I asked him, could Pope Francis make a difference?

“There were many attempts by the Holy See to try to avoid this war,” he tells me as we talk in the living room of the apostolic nunciature in Wimbledon, south-west London. “Sometimes it was successful, sometimes it was not. But the very fact that they [Russia] accept the Holy See, and the Pope in particular, as an interlocutor is already something very special because what happens in these wars is that nobody is looking for an interlocutor. Everybody is looking for an enemy.”
Last summer, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the Vatican would be “the ideal place” for talks with Russia, and it is understood there was a proposal for the countries’ leaders to sign a peace agreement in Rome, although this never materialised. Francis has met President Vladimir Putin three times, and the Vatican has diplomatic relations with both Russia and Ukraine. While the Ukrainians have said they would welcome the Holy See’s mediation, Russia has not given an indication either way.

“President Putin listens to the Pope, I cannot say anything beyond that,” Archbishop Gugerotti explains. He stresses that Putin has a “certain kind of respect” for Francis and his moral authority. Gugerotti understands how these negotiations work. A highly experienced diplomat and expert in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region, from 2015 to 2020 he served as apostolic nuncio to Ukraine and before that was the papal representative to Belarus. He was nuncio to Georgia during the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict. While in Belarus, he was reportedly the only diplomat able to visit the country’s political prisoners, negotiating directly on their behalf with President Alexander Lukashenko. He has also met Putin and Lavrov. At the end of 2020, he was sent to Belarus as a special papal envoy to talk to Lukashenko about the plight of exiled Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz. Soon after Gugerotti’s meeting with the Belarus leader, Kondrusiewicz returned to Belarus.
The 66-year-old Verona-born diplomat won a scholarship to study English in London as a teenager and speaks English fluently. He also speaks Russian, Armenian and French, and is an expert in the liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. He worked at the Holy See’s Congregation for the Eastern Churches and taught at the Pontifical Oriental Institute before Pope John Paul II appointed him nuncio to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2001. Gugerotti is a diplomat in the Francis mould, combining openness, pastoral warmth and humour with a shrewd eye for detail and situations.

Eastern political leaders “tend to be very enigmatic”, but papal diplomacy is effective, he says, because it engages with people at the personal, spiritual level. “The Vatican approach is to invoke a gesture or a word by the Holy Spirit that can enter the heart of the other person. In some situations, I couldn’t utter a single word, and then the word arrives.” Our “system”, the seasoned Vatican diplomat tells me, is “the man of faith, knowing how dialogue and negotiation work, going outside the common pattern and entering into a language that can melt hearts.”

There is talk of Francis making a peace mission to Ukraine with other religious leaders. Could this happen? “Everything is possible,” Gugerotti says. “The question is if it is useful at the moment.” The Pope is “never a political interlocutor” and using the Churches to put pressure on a government “is not a winning policy”. In other words, both parties need to be ready to come to the table. “What the Pope wants to avoid is to create further divisions. Whenever there is a common request, and he can see that his role will be practically positive, the day after this happens, the Pope is going – maybe even during the night.”

Before the Second Vatican Council, the Holy See’s diplomatic work was focused on serving the interests of the Church. Now, “the role of the Pope has become a universal support for peace”. And because “we are in a desert of moral figures”, he argues that the Pope’s position as a moral leader on the world stage is even more crucial. “He represents an enormous moral authority, including for non-believers … the role is that of a person and an institution that fights for good and against evil, and has nothing to offer in exchange. No personal interest, no weapons, no kind of economy. It’s just the strength of the Gospel.”

Last Sunday, Francis countered the Russian narrative that the conflict in Ukraine was a “special military operation”, describing it as a “war” in which “the rivers of blood and tears are flowing”. It was the toughest language he has used to date and came after he had taken the unprecedented step of making a personal visit to the Russian Embassy to the Holy See to express his concern.

Francis has faced criticism for not offering an explicit condemnation of Russia or of President Putin. Gugerotti said the Pope’s approach is nothing new, pointing out that “sometimes the popes were reproached” for not speaking out during times of war. Hanging over our conversation is the shadow of Pius XII, who continues to face intense scrutiny over allegations that he failed to speak out strongly enough against Nazi atrocities, even while he was working to save Jewish lives behind the scenes.
When it comes to mediation, Archbishop Gugerotti says the “sins of the person have to always be rejected”. On this, “we have to be very frank”. The war in Ukraine is “terrible” and “absolutely unacceptable”. At the same time, the Church’s role is also to be a “bridge of love and respect” and to avoid simply falling into rhetoric. “The goal of the Holy See is always to be an extreme possibility when all other possibilities have expired. If you pronounce a word of rejection, that possibility expires,” he explains. “The Pope and Vatican diplomacy have always to show that in spite of everything they respect every partner as a human being. That is the pre-condition of having a possible role [in mediating]. If a third party is absolutely and clearly rejecting one side, considering it monstrous, then the person doesn’t accept being involved, because the person does not feel accepted.” It is not, he adds, about looking for plaudits. “The Pope is old, he has no human glory to look for,” says Gugerotti. “The Church will continue as long as it preserves its role as being a moral guide.”

The Pope has worked hard to deepen ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2016, he held a historic meeting with Patriarch Kirill in Havana, Cuba. Yet the Patriarch of Moscow, who is close to Putin, has supported the Ukraine invasion and even linked it to a battle against gay rights parades. What, I ask, would the Pope say to Kirill if he met him now? The nuncio says Francis would “probably” ask to pray with him and then to “leave the palaces and go to the people who are suffering and just stay with them, and bless them and ask God for justice and for peace”. While speaking to Kirill could be “useful”, Gugerotti believes the most effective response would be for the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches to work together. In 2018, he was involved in distributing the €16 million (£13m) raised after the Pope called for a special collection across Europe for all Ukrainians. “This is ecumenism,” the archbishop says. “The language of faith and belonging to a population to where the Church lives is much stronger than any kind of political ideology.”

Archbishop Gugerotti has seen for himself the long-running conflict in Ukraine. He regularly visited the Donbas area to offer pastoral support to the people, some of whom were living underground. He remains in regular contact with people in Ukraine. He believes there is a “moral obligation” for the UK to welcome those fleeing the conflict. Although he recognises the need for “prudence”, he says: “We have never been so prudent with other people for the reason they were rich.” He adds: “We must not be afraid of poorer migrants, because some of the richer ones were probably more dangerous for our country.”

He suggests that looking back to what happened just after the collapse of the Soviet Union helps to understand the war in Ukraine. People were left starving, the oligarchs were buying up industries for nothing and, rather than helping ordinary Russians, “we continued to show we were afraid of them”. This does not justify what has happened, he says, but it helps “explain a kind of persistent danger of war”.

Despite the river of blood and tears, Archbishop Gugerotti remains hopeful for the Pope’s peace efforts. “I have seen so many things happen that were totally unexpected,” he says. “I very much believe in miracles.”