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Pope Francis has described two of Russia’s ethnic minority groups, the Chechens and Buryats, as some of the “cruelest” troops fighting in Ukraine.
“The cruelest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on,” the Pope said in an interview published Monday.
“I speak of a people who are martyred. If you have a martyred people, you have someone who martyrs them,” he added in the interview with Jesuit magazine “America,” which took place on November 22, according to the outlet.
Chechens are an ethnic group originating from Chechnya in southern Russia. The leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has largely been supportive of the war in Ukraine — including, allegedly, sending his sons to fight there.
Buryats are an ethnic group from eastern-Siberia which borders Mongolia.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova defended Russia’s ethnic make-up on her official Telegram channel.
“We are one family with Buryats, Chechens and other representatives of our multinational and multi-confessional country. And together we will definitely pray for the Holy See, each in his own way.”
The leader of the Catholic Church also addressed the anniversary of the Holodomor, which usually takes place on the fourth Saturday of November.
The Holodomor was a man-made famine that is widely attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. It led to millions of Ukrainians dying of starvation between 1932 and 1933.
“The genocide that Stalin committed against the Ukrainians [in 1932-33]. I believe it is appropriate to mention it as a historical antecedent of the [present] conflict,” Pope Francis said in the interview.
Some background: Since the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the two figure heads of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, and Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill have been at loggerheads. In June, Pope Francis described the war as Russian “expansionism and imperialism,” after urging Patriarch Kirill not to “become Putin’s altar boy.”
Two meetings have also been cancelled between the two churches. One in April was due to be in Jerusalem, with the second scheduled to take place in Kazakhstan in September. The two leaders of the church have only ever met once, in Cuba in 2016, since the Great Schism in the 9th century.
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