VATICAN (CNS): At the end of his general audience at the Vatican on December 21, a Ukrainian woman, Larysa, and her young son, Serhii, presented Pope Francis with several gifts and the names of Ukrainian prisoners of war, including her husband’s.
The names of the prisoners were given in the hope that the pope “may be able to facilitate their liberation or at least an improvement in their conditions of detention,” the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reported.
Pope Francis already has helped facilitate hundreds of prisoner exchanges with Ukraine and Russia. The exact number of people on this new POW list is not known, the newspaper reported.
Larysa also gave the pope a calendar titled, Azovstal, the name of the large steel plant in Mariupol that sheltered the city’s last group of organised defense against the Russian siege and eventual takeover of the city. The pope leafed through each of the full-colour pages of the calendar.
She also gave the pope a Marian icon and a traditional Ukrainian shawl. Serhii gave the pope a pair of white boxing gloves that belonged to his father and a spiral bound notebook, which, according to L’Osservatore Romano, had a map of Europe and Ukrainian soil affixed to the cover.
Diana Yurash, the wife of Andrii Yurash, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See, gave the pope a didukh—a traditional Christmas decoration made from sheaves of wheat from the year’s harvest.
“They are the last sheaves harvested in fields where now there are bombs and mines,” Iryna Skab, embassy assistant, told the Vatican newspaper.
