The infamy of Russian barbarity. Interview with the Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for “Il Foglio”
Kremlin drones flying over children returning to school. The fear and strength of a people. “Europe doesn’t understand that Ukraine is protecting the peaceful life of Westerners.” An interview with the head of the Greek Catholic Church of Kyiv, Sviatoslav Shevchuk.
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Air-raid sirens can be heard sounding while His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych and head and father of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, connects with Il Foglio for this conversation. This is the back-to-school season, and Vladimir Putin has decided that the best way to remind the invaded that the war exists, and that it will continue for as long as he wants, is to send drones to watch from above as children run toward their classrooms. A grim memento mori.
The war against Ukraine has, for months now, exceeded the duration of the First World War. In the collective imagination, that conflict of a century ago went down in history as a “useless slaughter,” a perfect definition coined by the Pope of that time, Benedict XV, as he looked upon millions dead in the trenches, butchered or gassed to conquer some patch of ground that would inevitably be lost again the next day.
But it might seem that this, now, is— to borrow the phrase from James Orr, the ideologue of Nigel Farage now fallen into disgrace — just a regional Slavic conflict, a matter between Russians and Ukrainians, a waste of time for Westerners who want to go to the seaside, shop in peace, enjoy sea urchins and Angus filets at the restaurant; a nuisance, a bore. As if there weren’t already so many problems. Usually it’s those who have never heard the sirens, who have never had the war brought home to them, who think this way.
“This war is a great hemorrhage in the human fabric of Europe. Unfortunately, to put it in medical terms, hemorrhages that don’t hurt, that don’t cause pain, are the most dangerous,” says Sviatoslav Shevchuk.
“People die from these internal hemorrhages. I would like to recall the scale of this tragedy. Obviously, it is a hybrid war — on one hand it closely resembles the trench warfare of the First World War, but the scale of this war is frightening.
For example, in just the first two months of the full-scale war, the United Nations estimated that 12.7 million people had been forced to leave their homes. Some were displaced within the country, others abroad. That is a number comparable to more than the entire population of Belgium, which has nearly twelve million inhabitants. According to data released at the start of the year by UNHCR, just under six million are abroad as refugees. Thank God we have been able to take in these people and prevent this humanitarian crisis from deteriorating into a humanitarian tragedy.
The other figure, a very sensitive one, which is often forgotten, is the length of the front line of combat, calculated to be between 1000 and 1200 kilometers. To make a comparison that can be understood by an Italian reader, that is 55 % of the length of Italy’s entire land border.
This is a war that contaminates the ground with explosive material. It is not simply a fight between groups — it causes contamination of the environment, and according to official data, 132,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory is contaminated with explosive material. That is 44 percent of the entire surface area of Italy. The other figure I find terrifying, above all for pastoral reasons, is that 114,000 people are officially recognized as missing.
Consider that the United States’ war in Vietnam counted 2640 missing and is regarded as a tragedy for the American nation. Yet last Sunday, when the whole world was marking the International Day of the Disappeared, [remembering those who have gone missing] during armed conflicts, in Ukraine we were aware that we already have 114,000 missing. 114,000 families who do not know the fate of their own relatives.
We spoke of the First World War. Giving exact figures is difficult, but some United Nations bodies have recently stated that there are today 1,700,000 soldiers in the trenches, Russians and Ukrainians combined. There are so many Russians — for us it’s a phenomenon that is hard to understand. It is barbarity: in these butcher’s attacks, Moscow keeps sending soldiers and more soldiers, without even counting the number of their own casualties, which are enormous. In these attacks, in fact, the attacker loses more than the defender.
But this war is not fought only along the front line of combat. There are sophisticated weapons here. Kyiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Kharkiv are bombed day and night with sophisticated drones equipped with cameras. The operator watches live as he kills civilians. They attack shops where people go to buy bread, markets, universities, schools. Every place where people gather.
For the start of the school year in Ukraine, one hundred underground schools have been built, and they say another hundred will be built by the end of this year. Russian drones follow the children as they go to school and attack them. It is terrorism.
Some analysts argue this war is becoming increasingly similar to the one between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s. Iraq and Iran could not advance on the frontline of fighting and began terrorizing civilians. It was called the war of the cities, but it led to nothing, only to the exhaustion of both sides.
As Archbishop Gallagher said in Moscow, this war has no military solution. It truly is a hemorrhage of the human fabric of Europe, and I am sorry that this hemorrhage no longer hurts the great democracies of Europe and the world, who hide behind the backs of Ukrainians, who with their own chests shield the tranquil, peaceful life of the European Union.”
The Major Archbishop of Kyiv-Halych speaks of a Ukraine that with its own chest defends Europeans, those same Europeans who are irritated by the noise and clamor of weapons beyond an imaginary curtain, who would still like to separate West from East, as if what is happening over there were a matter reserved for those peoples.
This irritation is also fed by the rhetoric that sees Russia as inescapably invincible: so large, with such a strong and numerous army. It can draw soldiers from anywhere, from the steppes of Siberia all the way to Vladivostok. It even has the backing of Kim Jong-un, who, when it comes to soldiers reduced to cannon fodder, is quite the expert. But why, we ask the man from Kyiv, do we in the West still think this way, after four years of war?
“In my view, so far Western Europe has not properly understood what Ukraine is as a nation, as an independent state. There is a historical view. Russia used to win the great wars — and it’s true—and it won them because Ukrainians also fought alongside it.
Today Russia, without Ukrainian resources, both human and natural, is no longer a world power. Russia has the capacity to rebuild neither its empire nor the old Soviet greatness. This is the first time in modern history that Ukraine is not fighting alongside Russia. Many, both in Russia and in the West, have not understood this. Moreover, this fact is ruining the myth of the great, invincible Russia. It is no longer so. Many mental frameworks and many ways of thinking remain disoriented.
A good portion of Westerners has always thought of Eastern Europe as a world apart, homogeneous. A foreign world. The very word ‘Europe’ was often used only in the sense of Western Europe. But that is no longer the case. Ukraine now shows itself to be a subject, not an object, of European politics, diplomacy, and economics. In fact, it is defending Europe itself.
Many wonder where this Ukrainian resistance comes from. We ourselves don’t fully understand it; every day we remain astonished by this strength.
We are rediscovering the strength of our own people. We are facing a clash between two different kinds of society. Ukraine, today, is a society that is part of a social network—of solidarity, information, mutual support—a network of civil society, which in some instances gives rise to state structures, to political life. [Ukraine is made up of] people who cooperate together, who experience a communion of life.
Russia, by contrast, is a rigid pyramid built without, and against, civil society. At the top of this pyramid is a criminal, kleptocratic government, a power that sought to rebuild itself by looking to the old Soviet system of power. In Russia there is no civil society. Russians are politically apathetic, because they know they cannot change anything. This pyramid is now up against a network. The Russians cannot win in Ukraine.
Of course, each type of society has its strengths and weaknesses. In Ukraine, for example, this network must constantly be reconnected and mended, because every trauma, every loss at the front or among civilians in the cities, causes the various threads in the network to break. In this network the churches are very active, because they watch for and tend to the traumas.
We might say it is very difficult for us to build strong state structures, but among us power changes hands, passing from one to another. In Ukraine, the one who governs changes because there is the foundation of civil society driving that change.
In Russia,” says Sviatoslav Shevchuk, “it is the opposite, even though this rigid pyramid is starting to show internal cracks. It is beginning to fall like some great colossus, and because of that it is becoming ever more dangerous, more deadly.
It sees itself as a besieged castle and perceives the whole world as the enemy. Obviously this vertical, pyramidal society is very rigid and opaque. For example, if the Russian president personally handles the micro-management of the military—that is, deciding which village is to be attacked on a given day—then all the other commanders, even military ones, feel stripped of their role and can no longer make decisions themselves.
A society shaped like a network, on the other hand, becomes ever more dynamic, centered on the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, private initiative, respect for a person’s activity and his own inviolability.
Looking at these two opposing faces, we perhaps understand Ukrainian resistance, the resistance of a wounded society that is reacting. For this conflict is not only causing breaks in the network, but also inner wounds to the soul. For us this is an existential struggle. If this pyramid swallows up the network, we know that the events of the past will repeat themselves, like the Holodomor, a genocide in which more than six million Ukrainians died of an ‘artificial’ famine.
This is why we must defend ourselves. We do so thanks to an international network. We are a transnational people: we have a global community of sixty million Ukrainians present throughout the world who support one another and defend their country.”
In all of this, there is the Holy See’s attempt to try to keep a channel of contact open even with the invader. Ten days ago, Msgr. Paul Richard Gallagher traveled to Moscow, and many in Italy presented the trip as an overture toward Russia. Yet the same Gallagher, two months earlier, had been in Ukraine and had spoken very forceful words about the need to defend the Ukrainian cause, even supporting the territorial integrity of the country invaded by Moscow. What is your view on this?
According to Sviatoslav Shevchuk, “Msgr. Gallagher’s mission was a prophetic one, in the sense of the prophecy of a voice crying out in the desert. It is interesting that Msgr. Gallagher arrived in Russia at the very moment when the head of the American intelligence services was landing there. Msgr. Gallagher truly spoke of dialogue and peace; he said that this war has no military solution, that a diplomatic solution must be found, and so on.
But as he was pronouncing these prophetic words, Russia at that very moment was planning an escalation of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, it was, and still is today, trying to carry this war beyond Ukraine, even beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
In Ukraine they say that the reason the head of United States intelligence came to Moscow is that Russia is trying to bring the war into outer space, even having plans to trigger a nuclear explosion aimed at striking the GPS satellite system, thereby attacking global communications.
This makes clear that the announcement brought by Msgr. Gallagher stood in sharp contradiction to the reality he found before him in Moscow. We followed this visit very closely. It was like descending into the abyss of hell and from there proclaiming faith in the resurrection of the dead.
Unfortunately, Lavrov and Peskov dismissed Msgr. Gallagher’s words as a mere slogan. This is very serious, because it shows just how much Russia holds diplomacy in contempt. The only language it understands is force, brute and military, and it is incapable of seeing its interlocutor as an equal.
I would also add that the Russians are interested in dialogue only when their interlocutors can be exploited for Moscow’s propaganda purposes. Whoever refuses to be exploited will be rejected. Msgr. Gallagher’s trip was a very delicate one: the risk of being exploited was very high, and the Holy See certainly cannot allow itself to be used in that way.
The Pope and the Secretary for Relations with States spoke clearly and plainly of peace. Speaking of peace in today’s Russia is, among other things, considered a crime. I would say, then, and I repeat, that it was a prophetic visit, but one that unfortunately did not open up any breakthroughs; to this day there has been no opening whatsoever.
Obviously, both pro-Russian media and their friends in the West, acting as good ‘useful idiots,’ will exploit it for their own purposes. But we in Ukraine know that Pope Leo is a Pope of peace, who proclaims it even when it runs against a very specific political current. Leo XIV proclaims values, defends the dignity of the human person, and with regard to Ukraine speaks of war in Europe, of respect for our Constitution. That is, he is proclaiming principles without which it will be impossible to bring this war to an end.”
And after years of clear tension, or perhaps misunderstanding, how is the role of the Holy See in relation to the ongoing conflict perceived in Ukraine today?
“I can say that at present the language of Pope Leo and of Vatican diplomacy is very clear. At times, in the past, it was precisely a certain interpretation of symbols and words, not so much of intentions, that caused misunderstandings. Today, what the Holy See says and does is very clear, and it is greatly appreciated in Ukraine.
From the very day of his election, Leo XIV was hailed in Ukraine as the Pope of peace, one who does not speak only in pacifist slogans — because an authentic, Christian peace has nothing to do with pacifism, especially of the communist stripe — but who is proclaiming the principles on which this peace can be built. A just and lasting peace, a disarmed and disarming peace. For this we are very grateful for this clarity; we have felt supported in this sense by the Holy See.
And we are grateful to him above all because in June, during the Consistory, the ideology of just war was rejected. That is instead exactly what is being proclaimed in Moscow: Patriarch Kirill has just published a book on just war, which for him is a holy war. It seems to me that the Holy See thinks in a completely different way.”
There is then a deeper problem, one that again has to do with a distracted West full of prejudices, one that carries entirely mistaken historical-religious judgments. There are indeed always those who see Russia as a bulwark defending so-called ‘true values,’ even Christian values.
And this despite the fact that Vladimir Putin has no qualms about bombing even the Dormition complex in Kyiv. Speaking of respect for Christian symbols…
The head and father of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church smiles in silence and waits a few seconds before answering.
“A few days ago,” he says, “a very compelling and important article appeared on this subject, written by Sergei Chapnin. He is an Orthodox believer who for fifteen years was part of the system of the Moscow Patriarchate and then had to leave for certain reasons. His article is titled ‘Faith Under Pressure.’ Chapnin dismantles the mythology of Russia as a bastion defending traditional values.
I would like to clarify one thing: we are not talking about Christian values. Russian propaganda leans on so-called traditional values. And the tradition being spoken of here is certainly not Christian. They exploit family values for military purposes; they practice a theology of death, not of resurrection. They no longer speak of Christian values, of God’s commandments.
It is a civic religion whose values are those of the Russian state. Talking about traditional values is therefore an ideological trap, the trap of the ideology of the Russian world.
A small example to make this clear: an Orthodox priest who does not want to pray for the war but prays for peace is not simply considered a dissident, but a heretic. His crime? Not supporting this new theology that combines vestiges of Christianity with the communist and Marxist ideology of the Soviet Union.
This is the context of the myth of Russia as defender of traditional values. It has nothing to do with the Christian tradition, nor with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Yesterday, at the end of the Angelus, the Pope’s thoughts once again turned to Ukraine: “With a grieving heart I have followed the news of the violent attacks that have recently struck several cities and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, causing the deaths of innocent people. My heart joins in the suffering of the population, which for years has been living in anguish and fear. I renew my appeal to end the violence, to stop the destruction, to open hearts to dialogue and to peace. I hope that the efforts undertaken in these days to resume negotiations will bear concrete fruit and open the way to diplomacy.”
Matteo MatzuzziPhoto — EPA / Сергій Долженко
