Russia condemns Pope’s racist speech on cruelty in war

Pope Francis has become embroiled in yet another controversy over the Ukraine War. After saying that the West was perhaps to blame for the Russian invasion of the neighbor, the pontiff made a clearly racist comment about the behavior of Vladimir Putin’s troops in the conflict.

In an interview with America’s leading Jesuit magazine, America, he said non-Christian soldiers serving Russia are more ruthless in combat than adherents of the majority Orthodox faith in Putin’s country.

“In general, the cruelest are perhaps those who are from Russia but not from the Russian tradition, like Chechens, Buryats and so on,” said the pope, who is a Jesuit.

Data collected by human rights NGOs in Russia point to a higher proportion of soldiers coming from parts of the country with non-Russian ethnic majorities in action in Ukraine. In the case of Chechnya, a republic of the Caucasus with a Muslim majority, this is even a selling point of the local government of Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin’s most aggressive allies. His Telegram channel is full of images of his men’s actions in Ukraine, having played a relevant role in the taking of Mariupol, in the south.

Buryatia, a Siberian republic in the Russian Far East, is known for its adherence to Tibetan Buddhism (about 20% of the population) and the shamanistic beliefs of the Mongols who historically inhabited the place.

“This is no longer Russophobia, it is a perversion on a level I can’t even name,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Telegram. “We are one family, with Buryats, Chechens and other representatives of our multi-national and multi-confessional country,” she said.

Despite being dominated by Slavic and Orthodox character centered on its European portion, Russia is a quilt of its 95 federal entities. From a religious point of view, Russian Orthodoxy accounts for about 40% of the declared faith in the country, with 6.5% of Muslims and 6.5% of other Christians as major minorities.

Heard by news agencies, even an NGO in favor of the rights of the Buryats and against the war, called Free Buryatia, criticized Francis. “I was extremely disappointed to read this inexcusable and racist statement,” said Alexandra Garmajapova. According to the RIA Novosti agency, Russia’s representation to the Vatican expressed its “great dissatisfaction” with the pontiff’s speech.

This was not always the case: no one in Russia complained when he claimed in an interview that the invasion was “somewhat provoked” by the West. Earlier, he had said that NATO, the Western military alliance, was “barking at Russia’s gates”, which could trigger conflict.

At the same time, he is an outspoken critic of the conflict, which has already led to stings from Moscow — the Putin regime is very close to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, the world’s leading Eastern Christian denomination. At the same time, Francis has shown signs of rapprochement with the Patriarchate of Moscow.