What Cardinal Parolin Said About Ukraine’s Advance Into Russia

“These are very worrying developments, because it means opening new fronts,” Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, said of Ukraine’s advance into Russia’s Kursk region, and he went on, “In this sense, the chances for peace could become increasingly distant.” Local journalists had asked him about it in Assisi on Sunday 11 August 2024, at the edge of the Mass for the feast of St Clare, and Vatican News, the Holy See’s own news service, printed his answer in Italian that day and in English the next.

Here are his two sentences side by side, and the Italian comes first because those are the words he used in Assisi.

Read across and you will see that the two do not quite match. The English says the chances for peace “could become” more distant, while the Italian verb, si allontanano, is a plain present, so that in his own language the possibilities of peace are moving further and further away. Vatican News put it a little more gently at the head of its Italian report, in the line “Sviluppi preoccupanti, la pace rischia di allontanarsi”, worrying developments, peace risks moving further off. Anyone who wants to quote him closely should go to the Italian.

Where and when did Cardinal Parolin say it?

He was in Assisi that Sunday to preside at the Mass for St Clare’s feast in the basilica dedicated to her, and Vatican News’s Italian report tells us that at the edge of the celebration he answered questions from some local journalists, one of which was about the offensive Ukraine had launched in the Russian region of Kursk. So what we have is his reply to a reporter, and it formed no part of his homily. The English report sums up his meaning as concern that the offensive could further escalate the war, and that summary is Vatican News’s own wording, set outside the quotation marks.

Only the month before, from 19 to 24 July 2024, he had made his first visit to Ukraine since the Russian invasion began, going to Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa and Berdychiv. He met President Volodymyr Zelensky there, and Catholic News Agency reported Zelensky saying afterwards that he was “grateful for [the] cardinal’s support of our country and people.” On that journey the cardinal told Vatican News that the Holy See had put its effort into humanitarian work, at the Ukrainian government’s own request too, “in view of taking steps that can truly lead to a just peace.”

What was happening in Kursk in August 2024

Ukrainian forces had entered Kursk Oblast on 6 August 2024, five days before he spoke, and a week into the operation the two sides were giving different numbers for how far it had gone. President Zelensky said on 13 August that 74 Russian settlements were under Ukrainian control, and the region’s acting governor put it at 28, as Catholic News Agency reported, drawing the governor’s figure from the Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta of 12 August.

A week after the cardinal spoke, on 18 August 2024, Zelensky said what the operation was for, in a nightly address we have through the Guardian’s news report of it. “It is now our primary task in defensive operations overall to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions,” he said. “This includes creating a buffer zone on the aggressor’s territory – our operation in the Kursk region.” The Guardian says it was the first time he had clearly stated the aim, and that earlier he had suggested it was to protect communities across the border in the Sumy region from shelling. Nothing in that report connects his address with the cardinal, so we should not hear it as an answer to him.

Why did Cardinal Parolin call the advance worrying?

Cardinal Parolin gave his own reason at once: the advance meant opening new fronts, and in that way the chances for peace moved further off. In those two sentences he does not say that Ukraine may not defend itself, and he does not call the advance unlawful. They are all the reports give us of what he said about Kursk, so we cannot tell whether he said more, and in them he gave no ruling either way.

What the Catholic Church teaches about a nation defending itself

The Church allows a nation to defend itself, for governments “cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says at paragraph 2308, and the very next paragraph tells us how closely it hedges that right. The harm done by the aggressor has to be lasting, grave and certain, every other way of ending it has to have been shown impractical or ineffective, there has to be a serious prospect of success, and the fighting must not bring worse evils than the one it sets out to remove, all of it at the same time. Who weighs all that? The Catechism leaves it to “the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” (paragraph 2309). It is speaking there of nations, and whether one person may kill an attacker is a separate question, taken up in Is killing in self-defense a sin?

Francis, then Pope, took up those conditions in his encyclical Fratelli tutti of 3 October 2020, a letter that was not written about Ukraine. Citing the Catechism’s “rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy,” he warned that “it is easy to fall into an overly broad interpretation of this potential right,” and he said that “it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war’” (paragraph 258).

Two years later, while still Pope, he was asked by a reporter from the German broadcaster ARD, on the flight home from Kazakhstan on 15 September 2022, whether Ukraine should be given weapons. It was “a political decision, which can be moral — morally acceptable — if it is done according to the conditions of morality, which are manifold,” the Pope said, and it “can be immoral if it is done with the intention of provoking more war or selling weapons or discarding those weapons that are no longer needed.” Then he spoke about defence itself: “To defend oneself is not only lawful but also an expression of love of country. Those who do not defend themselves, those who do not defend something, do not love it; instead, those who defend, love.” And he ended that answer by setting the limit beside the right: “But the right to defense yes, that yes, but one must use it when necessary.”

What Cardinal Parolin has said before and since

So the Church gives a nation the right and hedges it with warnings, and Cardinal Parolin, under two popes, has said both. On 11 March 2024, with Francis as Pope, he told Corriere della Sera, as EWTN News reported it, that it fell to Russia “as the aggressor” to “put an end to the aggression,” and that “The war unleashed against Ukraine is not the effect of an uncontrollable natural disaster but of human freedom alone.” At the peace summit in Switzerland on 15 and 16 June 2024, speaking for the Holy See, he described Ukraine as “making enormous efforts to defend itself from aggression” and said that “the only means capable of achieving true, stable and just peace is dialogue between all the parties involved,” and the Holy See, which had come as an observer, did not sign the final communique though it expressed support for the conclusions. Two months later came Assisi, and there, in the words reported, he gave only the warning.

In 2025 and 2026 he named the right in so many words. In La Repubblica on 18 April 2025, with Francis still Pope, he said that “it would be inhumane to deny Ukrainians the right to defend themselves,” while the Holy See was concerned “about the risk of an escalation of the conflict.” In La Stampa, as Vatican News reported on 4 June 2025, with Leo XIV as Pope, he was talking about Europe’s military spending, and Ukraine was not the subject, when he said, “The right to self-defense is not absolute,” and added, “It must be accompanied by the duty to minimize, and if possible, eliminate, the root causes of conflict.” And in La Repubblica on 4 October 2026, still under Leo XIV, he said, “A people cannot be denied the right to defend itself,” and that the Holy See “encourages every initiative aimed at achieving an immediate, comprehensive and effective ceasefire.” Vatican News set that at the head of its report: “Kyiv has the right to defend itself.” We have all three interviews through Vatican News’s summaries of them.

Did Ukraine answer the cardinal?

As of 8 November 2026 we know of no reply to the Kursk remark from Ukraine’s government or from the leaders of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The Ukrainian words we do have about the Vatican come from an earlier row, in March 2024, five months before Assisi and while Francis was Pope, and nothing in that row is an answer to Cardinal Parolin.

Part of an interview with the Pope on Swiss television came out on Saturday 9 March 2024, and in it, when the interviewer raised “the courage of surrender, of the white flag,” the Pope said that “the stronger one is the one who sees the situation, who thinks of the people, who has the courage of the white flag, to negotiate.” That evening the director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, said that the Pope “uses the term white flag, and responds by picking up the image proposed by the interviewer, to indicate a cessation of hostilities, a truce reached with the courage of negotiation,” and he recalled the Pope’s words elsewhere in the interview, “Negotiations are never a surrender.”

On 10 March 2024 Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, answered the Pope on X, in a post we have as reported by EWTN News: “Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags.” He also referred to “this Vatican’s strategy from the first half of the 20th century,” and the report does not say what he meant by it.

On 11 March 2024 the Permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church answered the Pope too, in a statement also reported by EWTN News. “Ukrainians cannot surrender because surrender means death,” it said, and “Notwithstanding the suggestions for need for negotiations coming from representatives of different countries, including the Holy Father himself, Ukrainians will continue to defend freedom and dignity to achieve a peace that is just.” The head of that church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, had told Ukrainians in New York on 9 March 2024 that “it never occurs to anyone to surrender,” and since his church’s report of that speech does not mention the Pope or the white flag, we cannot call the speech a reply to either.

Where things stood on 8 November 2026

As of 8 November 2026 none of these texts weighs the Kursk operation against the Catechism’s four conditions, and in the words we have from Assisi the cardinal did not do so either.

He said one more thing in Assisi that day, and here too the two reports differ a little. The English has him launching “a strong appeal for peace throughout the world,” and the Italian has “una forte preghiera e appello per la pace in tutto il mondo,” a strong prayer and appeal. A prayer for peace is something any of us can join him in, and there are words for it in our prayers for world peace. He went on, speaking of Francis, who was Pope at the time: “As the Holy Father has reiterated several times, war is a defeat for everyone and benefits no one.”

Related reading

• Biblical Debates: Is Killing in Self-Defense a Sin?
• What does the Bible say about self-defense?
• 23 Bible Verses About War
• 12 Prayers of Solidarity and Peace for Ukraine