Italian Cardinal Matteo Zuppi will be in Kiev today and Tuesday as the pope’s envoy for a peace-brokering mission in Ukraine, the Vatican said in a statement Monday.
“On June 5 and 6, 2023, Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, will visit Kiev as an envoy of Pope Francis”reads the note.
The main purpose of this initiative “is to listen carefully to the Ukrainian authorities about 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 Russian presidents Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky, although a date for the trip to Moscow has not yet been announced.
At the moment, the cardinal’s schedule in Ukraine has also not been disclosed.
Zuppi had already been instructed by Francis to “lead a mission to help de-escalate tensions in the conflict in Ukraine,” the Vatican secretary of state said a few weeks ago.
The Archbishop of Bologna is known as a religious “devoted to the poorest and migrants”.
These characteristics, but especially his work as a mediator in 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 give him this delicate mission. to trust.
Source: DN
