Pope Francis said in an interview published on Tuesday that he’d sought a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss stopping the war in Ukraine. However, the papacy is yet to receive any confirmation from Moscow. 

This comes on the heels of his latest comments slamming the war in Ukraine. The Pope said “I suffer and weep, thinking of the suffering of the Ukrainian people, and in particular of the weakest, the elderly and children. There are even terrible reports of children being expelled and deported”, describing the situation there as a “macabre regression of humanity”. 

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For a long time, the Pope has condemned the war in Ukraine and has even sent aid. Even now, he said his thoughts “go immediately to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, ‘Mary’s city’”. The Azov Sea port city has reportedly been “liberated” by Moscow, but a last battalion of soldiers remain trapped in the Azovstal steel plant, along with some civilians. There are efforts to have them evacuated but the steel plant is seeing constant attacks from Russia, as Moscow tries to browbeat the Ukrainian town into submission. 

Russia’s second wave of attack has been far more effective, allowing troops to move in from the east, and now the push from the south seems to be going well too. 

With Moscow’s new military strategy, there are some doubts about what’ll be Putin’s next steps. While the US and other Western intelligence officials have posited that Putin will declare all-out war on Ukraine on May 9, the Pope conveyed his belief that the day will mark the end of the war in Ukraine. 

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May 9 emerges as significant since it marks the day Moscow defeated Nazi troops. Seeing as Russia can now hold a good part of the Donbas region and get their territorial continuity corridor linking Donbas to Crimea, the Pope’s belief of the war ending holds water. However, the warning from intelligence officials echoes Chechen chief Ramzan Kadyrov’s earlier warnings that Moscow intended to capture all cities in Ukraine – something that an all-out war and mobilizing Russia’s reserve troops would allow Putin to do.