Vatican Secretary of State: Russia should cease fire first

March 12, 2024

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CWN Editor's Note: Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said that the warring parties in Ukraine should have “the courage to negotiate, which is never a surrender.”

In an interview published on March 12 by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Cardinal Parolin sought to clarify a controversial statement by Pope Francis, who had called upon Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war. The cardinal said: “It should be the aggressors who cease fire first—and then the opening of negotiations.”

Cardinal Parolin said that the Pope had not intended to put the burden of offering negotiations on Ukraine, but had merely meant to say that “negotiating is not weakness but strength. It is not surrender but courage.”

Asked whether the situation might be similar in the Holy Land, the Secretary of State said:

The two situations certainly have in common the fact that they have dangerously widened beyond any acceptable limit, that they cannot be resolved, that they have repercussions in different countries, and that no solution can be found without serious negotiation.

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• Posted by: Randal Mandock - Mar. 12, 2024 4:01 PM ET USA

  I side with Francis here. The Kiev government backed out of the proposed peace agreement in March 2022 that Russia had already signed. Russia has restrained itself from the actual aggression of a war of conquest because its mission from as early as 2014 was to stop the shelling of the Donbas region. I agree with Putin that he should not have waited until 2022 to forcefully negotiate an end to Kiev's war against its own people in the Donbas. Many lives would have been saved had he gone in in 2014