Marco Tosatti, prominent Italian journalist who covered the religious and political activity of the Holy See since 1981, has recently published in his blog a declaration regarding the crisis in Ukraine, attributed to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States.
In the opening part of his declaration, the archbishop noted how in August 1939, Pope Pius XII named "respect for mutual rights" as a prerequisite for a fruitful peace negotiation.
However, he wrote, if one were to look at the situation in Ukraine now, without allowing themselves to be "misled by the macroscopic falsifications of the mainstream media," they would notice that "respect for mutual rights' has been completely ignored."
"On the contrary, one gets the impression that the Biden administration, NATO and the European Union deliberately want to maintain a situation of obvious imbalance, precisely to make any attempt at peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis impossible, provoking the Russian Federation to unleash a conflict. Here lies the gravity of the problem," he wrote.
Vigano slammed the mainstream media coverage of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, saying that it is "presented to us as a consequence of Vladimir Putin's expansionist arrogance towards an independent and democratic state over which he would claim absurd rights", while Europe "obscures Russia Today and Sputnik, ensuring that information is ‘free and independent.’"
"The censorship against Russian broadcasters is clearly aimed at preventing the official narrative from being disproved by the facts," the archbishop lamented.
He pointed at the context of the current situation, noting how the US extended its "sphere of political and military influence" to almost all of the USSR’s former satellite states in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
"In practice, the Russian Federation finds itself under military threat - weapons and missile bases - just a few kilometres from its border, while it has no military base quite close to the United States," Vigano mused. "To consider NATO's enlargement to Ukraine, without arousing legitimate protests from Russia, is nothing short of disconcerting, especially given the fact that NATO made a commitment to the Kremlin in 1991 not to expand further."
The archbishop also turned his attention to the matter of biological laboratories in Ukraine, "under the control of the Pentagon".
"Information on the activity of the laboratories in Ukraine is obviously difficult to confirm, but it is understandable that the Russian Federation considered, not without reason, that they could constitute an additional bacteriological threat to the safety of the population," he wrote.