One of Ukrainian leader President Volodymyr Zelensky’s top aides blasted Pope Francis as “an instrument of Russian propaganda” after he told Russian Catholic youth “not [to] forget your heritage.”
“You are heirs of the Great Russia, the Great Russia of saints, of kings, the Great Russia of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great… Never give up this heritage,” the pontiff said in a video call on August 25th.
“If we evaluate the Pope’s phrases with an open mind, we see that they are an unconditional encouragement to aggressive imperialism, an applause to the bloody idea of the ‘Russian world’, which implies the brutal destruction of the freedoms and lifestyles of others,” accused Zelensky aide Mykhailo Podolyak in an interview with the Italian press.
“Francis encourages Putin’s misanthropic ideology, his genocidal foibles. One has to wonder what the Catholic Church is, what Christianity is… It seems that the Pope has once again been an instrument of Russian propaganda,” he alleged.
“It is precisely by relying on the Peter-Catherine-Stalin triad that the Russian army comes to kill the Ukrainians. The Pope exalts them and Putin uses them to eliminate our identity.”
It was Catherine the Great who brought Crimea, claimed by both Ukraine and Russia, into the Russian Empire. Previously, it was occupied by the Crimean Khanate, a Muslim successor state to the Mongol Empire which owed fealty to the Ottoman Turks.
For centuries prior the Russian conquest, Muslim Tatars had carried away tens of thousnads of Christians from Russia, modern-day Ukraine, and even Poland and Hungary in slave raids, to be sold in the Ottoman-controlled Crimean port of Caffa.
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