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The Vatican acted to mend strained relations with Ukraine on Tuesday after Pope Francis upset Kyiv by referring to Russian ultra-nationalist Darya Dugina, who was killed by a car bomb near Moscow, as an innocent victim of war.
Last week, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba summoned the Vatican’s ambassador in Kyiv to protest, saying the pope’s words were “unfair” and had “broken Ukraine’s heart”.
That move followed sharp criticism of the pope by Ukraine’s ambassador to the Vatican, Andrii Yurash.
Francis sparked the controversy last Wednesday while speaking off script at his weekly general audience on the day Ukraine marked its independence from Soviet rule in 1991 and six months after Russian forces invaded.
“Innocents pay for war,” Francis said in a sentence where he referred to “that poor girl thrown in the air by a bomb under the seat of a car in Moscow”.
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