ROME — Ukrainian Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk called for “zero tolerance” towards Russia on Tuesday, stressing that Vladimir Putin is committed to the complete destruction of the Ukrainian people.
“What happened in Ukraine is not a conflict, it is a crime against humanity; there are cruel criminals and innocent victims,” Archbishop Shevchuk said in an interview with an Italian newspaper. Il Foglio.
The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Shevchuk, denounced the West’s “misunderstanding” of war, which consists in trying to explain or justify Russia’s causeless aggression against Ukraine.
“There are many opinions and arguments about why Russia attacked Ukraine on a large scale, bringing destruction, suffering and death to our country,” the archbishop said. Said. “Ukraine has been a victim of Russian aggression since 2014, but since February 24 we Ukrainians have realized that this is not just a war of one country against another, and moreover, it is not a simple “army operation”.
Supreme Archbishop of Ukraine Svyatoslav Shevchuk asked journalists on Wednesday to reveal the extent of Russia’s evil against Ukraine. https://t.co/GPmUFfZZbS
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 31, 2022
Shevchuk said that the ideology of the “Russian world” stems from fundamentalism and a kind of radical nationalism that “want to spread around the world.” “The ideology of the Russian world denies the right of the Ukrainian people to exist, just as the ideology of Nazi Germany once did to the Jews.”
“Unfortunately, we are witnessing a synthesis of the Soviet and imperial mentality in Russia today. And now Ukraine is the victim of the distorted reconstruction of the borders of “great Russia”.
The archbishop said that in order to justify Russia’s aggression, he tried to portray Ukrainian society as part of the “collective West” under the influence of “Western immorality”. “Here arises intolerance to anything “not ours” that incites and justifies the use of violence to destroy all “contaminated”.
“To awaken the historical memory of this enemy, to fight, the word Nazism, which has lost all its original meaning and is now a common term for all “Western things”, was used.
“Therefore, a Ukrainian is called a Nazi heresy. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that Russia is in a cultural conflict, not just with Ukraine, but with everything we define as Western civilization,” he said.
“The main purpose of the Russian occupation is the destruction of the Ukrainian people,” Shevchuk said. “This is confirmed by both Putin’s ideological speeches, which are often cited in Ukrainian history, and the war crimes committed by his soldiers on our land.”
The Archbishop continued to insist that what was happening in Ukraine was nothing more than a war and a “conflict”.
Orthodox Bishop Epiphanius, Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a new Antichrist who has decided to destroy the Ukrainian people”. https://t.co/bYKUo0xanN
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 9, 2022
“I see the Western media talking about the Russia-Ukraine conflict lately,” he said. “There is no conflict in Ukraine. Because conflict always produces a symmetrical discourse paradigm; Conflict means that there are two groups, each with its own cause, and they are in conflict.”
According to him, there is no such reality in Ukraine. There are no two sides and there are some middle truths. “There is a criminal, there is an aggressor and there is a victim.”
“We should declare “zero tolerance” to criminals,” he said. “I think we should stop talking about the conflict and talk about war crimes in Ukraine instead,” he said.
“If the state’s interest causes war and the death of more than 40 million people, it is no longer an interest, it is a crime,” he said.
“It is also important to find the right terms to describe everything that is happening in Ukraine, because the word “war” in the generally accepted sense can no longer describe this tragedy. If they have any doubts, I invite them to go to Ukraine and see for themselves.”
Shevchuk also talked about the mass graves of civilians he saw in his interview and the testimonies of rape victims perpetrated by Russian soldiers.
This July 15, 2022 photograph shows newly excavated graves in a cemetery in the Vinogradnensky district of the Donetsk region against the background of the ongoing Russian military offensive in Ukraine. (AFP via Getty Images)
“Unfortunately, these are not isolated cases, but we see the systematic actions of Putin’s army at the expense of innocent people of Ukraine, and mass graves “found in Bucha, Mariupol, Makarov” and other cases of torture against the civilian population and children.
The archbishop also described how the Russian army built a torture chamber in an Orthodox church near the ancient city of Chernihiv. “During the construction of the temple, the inhabitants of the villages of Yakhidnoye and Lukashevka were tortured,” he said, and numerous “decomposed corpses” were found around the temple.
“It is now becoming increasingly clear to us, at least in Ukraine, that Russia’s war against Ukraine has a clear ideological structure, which is called the ideology of the Russian world,” he said.
“War is not a game,” he insisted. “In my opinion, sometimes in the West the word “war” is associated with electronic games. Unfortunately, those who plan wars do not know what war really is. But when we see the reality of the war in Ukraine, we are faced with utter destruction.”
Source: Breitbart
