Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, chosen by Pope Francis to carry out a peace mission to try to mediate in the war in Ukraine, traveled to Kyiv on Monday for a two-day visit to speak with the Ukrainian authorities. It is the first trip since Pope Francis announced that he had commissioned this cardinal, president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, to carry out a peace mission to help reduce tensions in the conflict.
“This is an initiative whose main objective is to listen to the Ukrainian authorities on possible ways to achieve a just peace and to support gestures of humanity that help to reduce tensions,” the Vatican explained in a brief statement in which it did not it was indicated if Zuppi is going to speak directly with the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky.
The note also does not speak of a possible similar trip to Moscow after passing through Kyiv. In his daily press conference, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, assured that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not have a meeting with Cardinal Zuppi on the agenda, but he has not denied the trip, in preparation, of the Pope’s envoy to the Russian capital. “About the rest, it will be reported” later, Peskov has limited himself to saying.
Zuppi is the protagonist of a mysterious secret “mission” that the Pope spoke about for the first time during his return from his trip to Budapest at the end of April. “There is a mission in progress but it is not public. When it is, I will reveal it,” the Pontiff said then. A few weeks ago, the Holy See confirmed that Francis had asked the Italian cardinal to carry out this mission “with the hope, never abandoned by the Holy Father, that it can initiate peace processes.”
It is not the first time that Zuppi has been part of a mediation process. He already did it, as a member of the Community of Sant’Egidio, in the civil war in Mozambique in 1990. In 2017 he was also present at the act of handing over the weapons of the terrorist group ETA in the French city of Bayonne.
