““I listened and told him: ‘I don’t understand any of this. 'He's an embarrassment': Ted Cruz slammed by family of ex-Marine Trevor Reed after release from Russia.Texas 14-year-old who was shot for his shoes has died, police say.Two dead, four injured in head-on collision in the San Antonio area.TikTok reveals the horrors of Dollar Tree in Texas with only one employee.'It's a joke': Former 'Bachelor' contestant Demi Burnett slams Texas' education system.Here are the top 5 Mexican fast-food restaurants in Texas, per report.MySpy: H-E-B New Braunfels unveils first Home by H-E-B department.Francis and Kirill had a videoconference call March 15, and were due to meet for a second time next month in Jerusalem, but the meeting was called off on the advice of Vatican diplomats.įrancis told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview published Tuesday that Kirill spent the first half of their 40-minute videocall reading from a piece of paper justifying the invasion. The pope has tried to keep a dialogue open with Kirill, given the Vatican’s longstanding efforts to heal relations with Russian Orthodoxy.
“It is amazing that a great and powerful country never attacked anyone - it only defended its borders.” Russia has never attacked anyone,” he said Wednesday at the end of a Divine Liturgy at the Archangel Cathedral in Moscow, according to a text of his remarks on the church website. And in his most recent published remarks, he denied Russia had even launched the invasion. Kirill has echoed Putin’s unfounded claims that Ukraine was engaged in the “extermination” of Russian loyalists in Donbas, the breakaway eastern region of Ukraine held since 2014 by Russian-backed separatist groups. He added that the measure would only delay the prospect of peace "for which the Russian Orthodox Church prays on the blessing of His Holiness the Patriarch in every liturgy.” “You have to be completely unaware of the history of our church to think that it’s possible to scare its clergy and believers by putting them on some kind of lists.” “Patriarch Kirill comes from a family whose members have been subjected to repression for decades for their faith and moral standing during the days of militant communist atheism, and none of them were intimidated by the prospect of imprisonment and repression,” church spokesman Vladimir Legoyda said in a statement on his messaging app channel. In a statement Wednesday, the Russian Orthodox Church vowed the sanctions would never intimidate Kirill and would just prolong the conflict. If approved by EU members, Kirill would face travel bans and a freeze of assets, joining 1,093 individuals, including Putin and oligarchs, as well as 80 entities already subject to the punishing measures. Three EU diplomats with direct knowledge of the discussions said negotiations to add Kirill’s name to the EU list of sanctioned individuals were continuing Wednesday.