The Pope is fighting alongside us and has spoken to Putin: “A truce for Oleshky”

The Pope, who is recovering following surgery to remove a malignant tumour from his lung, is working as if he were in his study in the Vatican. Today, perhaps also to dispel speculation about a possible ‘restructuring’ of the papacy, following the usual medical bulletin reporting on his progress, two photographs were also released showing Leo XIV celebrating Mass at the Gemelli Hospital (he also delivered the homily, which is undoubtedly a positive sign). Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, the Holy See Press Office announced that the Pope had held a telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin, during which he “expressed deep concern about the grave humanitarian situation in the town of Oleshky, in the Kherson region, calling for a ceasefire to allow the delivery of food and medical aid and the voluntary and safe evacuation of the civilian population”.

Oleshky has become one of the many towns that symbolise this conflict and the Kremlin’s brutality. In 2021, the year before the invasion, it had 40,000 inhabitants. Today, there are 1,000. A thousand people, mostly elderly, unable to flee. Anyone who tries to escape risks being blown up by one of the hundreds of landmines left in the ground. The town is almost entirely destroyed; there is nothing left to eat, so people have to make do with whatever they can find. Even weeds, as Tetiana Hasanenko of the town’s military administration explained. The situation echoes the Holodomor, the genocide meticulously planned by Stalin to break the Ukrainian people in the 1930s. Vasily Grossman described scenes that could well be a depiction of what is seen today in Oleshky: starving, desperate people boiling their shoelaces and eating tree bark.

It remains unclear whether Pope Leone, during his telephone call with Putin (the second in eighteen months; the first had taken place less than a month after the election, in June 2025), had the opportunity to remind him of this. According to the Interfax news agency, the Russian president replied that the responsibility lies with “the regime in Kyiv”.