Ukraine asks Vatican to formalise mediation role

Rome: Ukraine has asked the Vatican to formalise its role facilitating negotiations over the return of Ukrainian children and civilians taken by Russia during the nearly four-year war, a Kyiv government official said Wednesday.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made the request in a letter to Pope Leo XIV ahead of an audience Friday between the pope and a delegation of returned Ukrainian children and civilians.

The letter asked that Leo formalize the informal arrangement launched by Pope Francis in which an Italian cardinal, Matteo Zuppi, had served as a personal papal envoy for humanitarian issues.

“To be able to achieve more, we need to formalize this process in the Vatican, and this is why this request now comes officially,” said the deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, Iryna Vereshchuk.

She told reporters in Rome that Ukraine wanted the Holy See to act as the middleman, or “platform,” through which Ukraine and Russia could discuss the return of civilians.

It is not clear whether any have been returned via the Vatican’s informal channel.

Vereshchuk was accompanying a delegation of Ukrainian children, parents and grandparents who had lived in Russian-controlled or occupied parts of Donetsk or were held by Russian forces elsewhere and were now living in Ukrainian-controlled territory.

She said under the Zuppi mission, Russia had managed to use a “gray zone” to not respond to Ukraine’s lists of civilians it wanted released, because the process was not formalised. “Once the process is formalized we can have proper communications with the Russians and when we submit a letter through the platform they will have to respond,” she said.