Communiqué: Dicastery for the Service of Charity

Cardinal Krajewski in Ukraine to deliver four ambulances

Vatican City (7 April 2025) – “Jesus alone opens up before us the doors of life, those doors that continually we shut with the wars spreading throughout the world”. Pope Francis’ words, pronounced on Easter Sunday 2024 in the Urbi et Orbi Message, become action to break down closure and to bring the Easter light into the darkness of the shadows.

Therefore, in this time of Easter rebirth, the Pope wished to carry out a gesture of closeness in one of the places that suffer the most, where war has raged for three years: tormented Ukraine. Three years that for the Pope are a “painful and shameful anniversary for humanity”. Pope Francis always remembers the eastern European country, both in prayer at the Angelus and in his appeals for peace where he makes constant reference to other dramatic scenarios, such as Palestine, Israel, Myanmar, Kivu and Sudan.

The Holy Father has therefore decided to send the Almoner of His Holiness to Ukraine to donate four ambulances, equipped with every medical instrument necessary to save human lives, which will be destined for war zones. Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, assisted by three drivers from Ukraine, will be in the country to stay with the people so severely tested by the conflict, to pray with them and to be an expression of the Pope’s closeness.

A mission, the tenth in Ukraine for the cardinal, which comes in the midst of the Jubilee of Hope; in the Bull of Indiction of the Holy Year, Spes non Confundit, the Pontiff writes that “The first sign of hope should be the desire for peace in our world, which once more finds itself immersed in the tragedy of war… The need for peace challenges us all, and demands that concrete steps be taken”. The gift of the four ambulances thus becomes a sign of Jubilee hope anchored in Christ.