Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church has for the first time directly appealed to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to stop the ‘spiral of violence and death’ in Ukraine.
In an address on Sunday dedicated to Ukraine in St Peter’s Square, the head of the Catholic Church said he is haunted by ‘rivers of blood and tears’.
‘My appeal goes above all to the president of the Russian Federation, begging him to stop this spiral of violence and death, even out of love for his own people,’ he said.
In a related development, Pope Francis appealed to Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to be open to serious peace proposals to halt the ongoing war.
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He also lamented the annexation of four Ukrainian regions by Russia’s troops, saying it risked nuclear escalation, hence urging Putin to think of his own people.
Africa Today News, New York recalls that, Putin had proclaimed the annexation of four partially occupied Ukrainian regions, calling the residents of Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions ‘our citizens forever’.
Ukraine and Western allies condemned the annexation as illegal, and Kyiv said it will continue fighting to recapture all occupied Ukrainian territory.
Meanwhile, a Nigerian public affairs analyst, Emesakoru Enifome has submitted that the actions of Russian President, Vladimir Putin, grossly violate all norms of international law, adding that there is a double nuclear danger in the region.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and occupation of Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), Europe’s largest nuclear power station, have triggered the first real-world case of a crisis that security scholars have feared for decades – a threat of radiological disaster from a wartime incursion on an operating nuclear power plant.
He said the danger is as a result of a possible technogenic disaster at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant due to provocations and other dangerous activities of the occupiers, and secondly, as a result of threats to use Russian nuclear weapons in the region for the so-called ‘protection’ of allegedly ‘Russian territory’.
He said regular Russian provocative shelling of this nuclear facility created the conditions for a large-scale man-made disaster in the center of Europe.