Shevchuk: Pope’s Oleshky Calls Were Prophetic
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic leader warns against capitulation and recalls the hunger siege of a mined town of 40,000.
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk on November 5 praised Pope Leo XIV’s telephone appeals to Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky for a humanitarian truce around Oleshky as a “prophetic gesture in the middle of a humanitarian desert,” saying that without the Holy Father’s voice and direct intervention, the ceasefire would not have been possible.
Shevchuk said the Pope phoned the Russian president while still a patient at Rome’s Gemelli hospital and, on the Monday after his discharge, called the Ukrainian president. The major archbishop, who met Leo XIV for the fifth time on October 23, described Oleshky—home to about 40,000 people before the war—as encircled and mined since the start of the year. Residents, he said, survived the summer by eating green leaves. Roughly 800 people were evacuated, flown by Russian aircraft to Belarus and then bused to the Ukrainian border, where Caritas received them. Oleshky lies only nine kilometers from Kherson; many of those who left remain unaccounted for.
Capitulation Would Mean Death
In remarks the same day, Shevchuk rejected counsel that Ukraine should surrender. “Some advise Ukraine to capitulate and surrender. That would mean surrendering to death,” he said. “We are not a territory, we are a people.” He likened the blockade of Oleshky to the artificial famine of 1932–1933. Nearly two-thirds of Ukrainian families, he added, live in forced separation, and the birth rate stands at 0.6 percent, compared with 1.3 percent in Austria—figures he cited in connection with the Amoris laetitia Summit.
According to Shevchuk, President Putin stated there would be no further truces of this kind, while President Zelensky replied that the episode “shows it can be done.” Days after the major archbishop’s audience with the Pope—during which he handed over lists of prisoners—270 Ukrainian captives returned home.
The Greek Catholic leader’s testimony underscores both the concrete fruit of papal diplomacy in a localized humanitarian corridor and the continuing cost of a war that has emptied towns, scattered families, and left the wounded Church of Ukraine pleading for peace without surrender of its people.