Pope and Ukraine’s Vatican ambassador clash over ‘innocence’ of assassinated Russian pundit Daria Dugina
In a public appeal on Wednesday, August 24, Pope Francis commented on six months of war in Ukraine by “implore[ing] peace from the Lord for the beloved Ukrainian people.” After warning of “the risk of a nuclear disaster in Zaporizhzhia” and recalling the children orphaned and forced from their homes by the war, Francis mentioned “the innocents who are paying for madness, the madness of all sides,” alluding specifically to Daria Dugina as “that poor girl blown up by a bomb under her car seat in Moscow.”
Andrii Yurash, Ukraine's ambassador to the Vatican, later called the Pope’s remark’s “disappointing,” arguing that Dugina — “one of the ideologists of Russian imperialism” — is not an “innocent” and doesn’t deserve to be named alongside the victims of Russian aggression. Yurash also claimed that Dugina “was killed by Russians as [a] sacred victim and is now on [Russia’s] shield of war.”
Daria Dugina, the daughter of Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin and a pro-war pundit in her own right, was killed in a car bombing on August 20 in Moscow. Federal officials have blamed the Ukrainian intelligence community for the attack, but officials in Kyiv attribute the murder to groups inside Russia.
