Pope Francis discussed peace efforts in Ukraine with the country’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, during a private audience at the Vatican on Thursday, their first known meeting since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
After the meeting, Mr. Shmyhal told reporters that he had again extended an invitation to the pontiff to travel to Ukraine, a visit Ukrainian authorities have been pushing for but that Francis has said would only happen when he can also go to Russia.
The relationship between Ukraine and Francis, who has long called for peace and decried what he called barbaric acts of war, was troubled in the early months of the conflict. Ukrainian leaders criticized his stance as too neutral, though the pope has since escalated his criticism of Moscow and has met with representatives of the Ukrainian government multiple times.
Mr. Shmyhal said that he and Francis discussed on Thursday what “assistance from his Holiness and the Vatican” could be offered to help achieve peace, he said, though he did not elaborate.
Mr. Shmyhal also asked the pope for help in “returning home Ukrainian children” who have been deported to Russia. Ukraine says as many as 16,000 children have been forcibly moved to Russian-controlled territories, with some describing a wrenching process of coercion, deception and force. Russia portrays the deportations as a humanitarian project.
The Vatican called the discussions on Thursday “cordial,” and listed humanitarian issues as among the topics covered.
Early in the war Ukrainian officials criticized the pope’s decision not to name Russia or its president, Vladimir V. Putin, as the aggressor in the conflict. Traditionally, pontiffs have avoided picking sides in conflicts to better preserve the church’s chances of playing a constructive role in potential peace talks.
The Vatican had also avoided criticizing Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, the invasion’s chief religious patron and apologist, but the pope’s position ostensibly changed after a video conference with Kirill last year, when Francis warned him not to “transform himself into Putin’s altar boy.”
Months into the conflict, the Vatican stepped up its language against Russia, too. Francis said in August that the Russian Federation had initiated a war that was “morally unjust, unacceptable, barbaric, senseless, repugnant and sacrilegious.” In November, he also compared the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Holodomor genocide of the 1930s, when the policies of the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, gave rise to a terrible famine in Ukraine.
The pope has maintained that he could only visit Ukraine if he also visited Russia, saying over the summer that “it is not easy to make a decision that could do more harm to the whole world than good.”
“I will go to both places or to neither,” the pope was quoted as saying in an interview with the Argentinian newspaper La Nacion last month.
The pope has made reconciling the Roman Catholic Church with Eastern Orthodox churches, including that led by Kirill, a key goal of his pontificate. The Western and Eastern branches of Christianity split nearly 1,000 years ago.
The meeting with Mr. Shmyhal came a day before the pontiff was set to travel to Hungary, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine expected to be a key theme of the visit. Francis will spend three days in Hungary, meeting with government officials, religious leaders and clerics, as well as refugees from Ukraine and other countries.
In the past, Francis has criticized Hungary’s harsh immigration policies, and the meeting with refugees could provide a stage for Francis to champion the need to welcome and care for migrants. Francis thanked Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for his country’s early efforts to support Ukrainian refugees when he visited the Vatican in April last year.
Mr. Shmyhal was in Rome for a bilateral conference on the reconstruction of Ukraine alongside Italian and Ukrainian business leaders. He said that the two countries had agreed on projects on industrial, logistics and energy sectors.
Italy’s largest construction company, Webuild Group, signed a memorandum of collaboration with Ukraine’s main hydropower plant operator to potentially plan the building of new hydropower facilities in the country.
