Russia hits out at Pope for calling ethnic minority soldiers 'cruel'

The Russian government has condemned comments made by the Pope that some minority groups of soldiers have behaved worse than others in the invasion of Ukraine.

"Generally, the cruellest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on," Pope Francis told America, a US-based Jesuit magazine in an interview last week.

The Pope also called the Holodomor famine caused by the Kremlin in Ukraine in the 1930s a genocide. As many as four million Ukrainians died in this famine which was caused by the collectivisation of farms under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.