Pope Francis has called Ukrainians a "noble" people being martyred as they are subjected to savageness, monstrosities, and torture amid Russia's unprovoked invasion of their country.
Francis did not name Russia in his remarks on September 21 at the end of his general audience on St. Peter's Square. He told the crowd of a conversation he had the previous day with Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, his charity chief who is delivering aid in Ukraine.
According to Vatican media, Krajewski, who is Polish, had to run and take cover after coming under light gunfire last week while delivering aid with a Catholic bishop, a Protestant bishop, and a Ukrainian soldier. Krajewski also visited mass graves outside Izyum in northeast Ukraine.
"He (Krajewski) told me of the pain of these people, the savage acts, the monstrosity, the tortured bodies they find. Let us unite with these people, so noble and martyred," Francis said.
Ukrainian officials said last week that they had found 440 bodies buried in a forest near Izyum, a town in northeastern Ukraine recaptured from Russian forces. They said most of the dead were civilians, some with their hands tied behind their backs. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called it proof of war crimes.
The Kremlin, which has denied all charges of rights violations and crimes by its invading forces in Ukraine, rejected allegations of such abuses in Kharkiv region, where Izyum is located, as a "lie.”
Of the 111 civilian bodies exhumed by September 21, four showed signs of torture, Serhiy Bolvinov, the head of investigative police in the Kharkiv region, told Reuters at the burial ground.