ROME – As the world marked the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine yesterday, the failure to date of all diplomatic efforts, including those of the Vatican, to bring the war to an end were painfully clear.
The most obvious reason for those failures, of course, is the fact that neither Russia nor Ukraine have yet shown any real interest in making the sort of concessions that would be necessary for a negotiated settlement.
Yet with regard to the Vatican specifically, there are a handful of additional factors which help explain why its efforts to play a mediating role have come up short, and recently a new one has begun to come into focus: The fact that Pope Francis’s external and internal agendas may be in conflict vis-à-vis engaging Russia.
