Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi will be in kyiv this Monday and Tuesday, as the Pope’s envoy, for a peace mediation mission in Ukraine, the Vatican announced today in a statement.
“On June 5 and 6, 2023, Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and President of the Italian Episcopal Conference, will visit Kiev as an envoy of Pope Francis,” the note reads.
The main objective of this initiative “is to listen carefully to the Ukrainian authorities on possible ways to achieve a just peace and to support humane gestures that contribute to easing tensions,” the statement said.
According to the Vatican, Zuppi would be a kind of interlocutor between the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the Ukrainian, Volodymyr Zelensky, although a date for the trip to Moscow has not yet been announced.
At the moment, the cardinal’s agenda in Ukraine has not been revealed either.
Francis had already entrusted Zuppi “to lead a mission to help reduce tensions in the conflict in Ukraine,” according to the Vatican’s secretary of state, a few weeks ago.
The Archbishop of Bologna characterizes himself as a religious “devoted to the poorest and migrants.”
These characteristics, but above all his mediation work in the peace agreements in Mozambique in 1992, in Guatemala in the mid-1990s and for his collaboration with Nelson Mandela for the ceasefire in Burundi in 2003, led the Pope to entrust him with this delicate mission.
Source: TSF
