“If you form an alliance with someone you at the same time enter into an alliance against someone,” Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s Secretary for Relations with States, said in an interview with a German podcast. “The Holy See has a universal mission.”

“It is not that we do not see who the aggressor is and who the victim,” he continued. “One cannot simply speak of good and evil. Things are not that simple. Our approach is to work towards peace – and possibly to act as mediator.”