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Pope Leo XIV phoned Vladimir Putin on Friday, Oct. 16, from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, three days after surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung.
He had one request. Leo asked the Russian president to halt the fighting in Oleshky, an occupied city on the Dnipro River where roughly 1,700 civilians, 47 of them children, have been cut off from food and medicine (the count comes from Danielle Bell, who leads the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine).
Moscow answered within hours. “The Vatican’s intention to help create the conditions necessary to ensure the safety of the town’s population and to organise vital supplies has been supported,” the Kremlin said, adding that “it has been agreed to cooperate on this matter.”
One week later, the White House announced that the truce belonged to Melania Trump.
On Friday, Oct. 23, the Office of the First Lady declared that Russia and Ukraine would stop all military action in Oleshky beginning Oct. 29, so aid could enter and civilians could leave through a safe corridor. Her office cast her as the “Exclusive Intermediary.” Her husband told reporters the ceasefire was her initiative. “What she wants to do is save children,” the president said.
The statement never mentioned the pope.
A mission that began on day one
Leo did not stumble onto Ukraine in October.
On May 11, 2025, three days after his election, he used his first Sunday address from the loggia of St. Peter’s to tell the world, “I carry in my heart the sufferings of the beloved Ukrainian people.” Then he made a demand that has defined his diplomacy ever since: “Let all the prisoners be freed and the children return to their own families.”
He phoned Volodymyr Zelensky the next day, and the Ukrainian president said afterward that they discussed “the thousands of Ukrainian children deported by Russia.”
After his inauguration Mass on May 18, Leo received Zelensky in person; the Ukrainian president gave him an icon of the Mother of God painted on a piece of an artillery box from Izium, a gift he said stood for the children Russia had taken.
On June 4, Leo called Putin and urged Russia to make “a gesture that would favor peace.”
Pope Francis began this work before him. On Feb. 25, 2022, the day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Francis went to the Russian Embassy to the Holy See and spent half an hour there to express his concern about the war. In May 2023, he named Cardinal Matteo Zuppi his envoy, and Zuppi’s trips to Moscow focused on reuniting deported Ukrainian children with their families and on prisoner exchanges. Vatican News has reported that a number of those children made it home through the channel Zuppi opened.
His funeral carried the same work forward. On April 26, 2025, Trump and Zelensky sat face to face on two chairs inside St. Peter’s Basilica, their first meeting since their Oval Office blowup in February, and Zelensky said afterward that it could prove historic.
Zuppi stayed on the job under Leo.
The cardinal describes the mission as one “entrusted to me initially by Pope Francis and subsequently confirmed by Pope Leo XIV,” and he flew to Moscow a third time from Sept. 28 to 30, where he met Ukrainian prisoners of war for the first time.
That was the same month Mrs. Trump’s office says Oleshky first came to her attention.
From a hospital bed
Leo told the crowd in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Oct. 11, that doctors had found a nodule on his lung and would remove it. Surgeons operated that Tuesday, and the pathology came back as lung adenocarcinoma, the most common form of the disease.
Some cardinals began voicing concern about his health in public, and at least one suggested he might need to change his routine, something cardinals almost never say about a sitting pope.
He kept working.
The Vatican said he resumed his duties on Thursday, and the call to Moscow came the next afternoon. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, told reporters the call was Leo’s initiative; a senior Vatican source told America that the Holy See placed it. Putin, for his part, wished the pope a speedy recovery.
Leo walked out of Gemelli on Saturday without help. Before getting into his car, he stopped to talk with a Ukrainian family, and a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl handed him a stuffed toy.
On Monday, Oct. 19, he called Zelensky — their third phone conversation of the pontificate. He raised the “grave situation” in Oleshky and briefed the Ukrainian president on the request he had put to Putin. “We are preparing decisions,” Zelensky said afterward.
The order of events is plain.
The pope moved Moscow first, from a hospital bed, and he had Kyiv on the phone two days after his discharge. Two days after that, his doctors said he needs no further cancer treatment.
The rewrite
The White House now says Oleshky came to Mrs. Trump’s attention during a private conversation at the U.N. General Assembly in September, and her adviser Marc Beckman told Newsmax she has been “working tirelessly now for over a month.”
Both claims come from her own team, and the White House offered both on the day of the announcement. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, have since credited her with a role.
Beckman was back on television Saturday morning with a version of events that puts the pope in second place. “As a result of her participation, I guess she caught the attention of the pope,” he told Fox & Friends Weekend, adding that Leo “stepped in and supported her efforts” a few days ago. “But ultimately, it was the First Lady that initiated the process,” he said.
The public record is different.
Leo had been pressing for Ukraine’s children since May 2025, and the Kremlin’s Oct. 16 commitment to cooperate on Oleshky answered the Vatican, a full week before the White House said a word. The Oct. 23 statement erased him from the story.
Days before the announcement, Trump called his wife “the next Eleanor Roosevelt.” HuffPost, reporting on his remarks Friday, noted that he has also called for Zelensky to be ousted and excused Putin’s breaches of an energy ceasefire Trump himself had declared. A president serious about a truce in Oleshky would hardly be working to remove one of the two men who have to keep it.
Why the Catholic vote explains it
The midterms are Nov. 3, and this administration is losing Catholics.
A Pew Research Center survey found Trump’s approval among Catholics has fallen from 47 percent at the start of his second term to 30 percent this month.
Among white Catholics, his strongest bloc in the Church, it dropped from 59 to 39.
Analysts who spoke with OSV News pointed to two causes. One is an immigration crackdown the bishops have opposed for months; the other is the attacks Trump aimed at Leo this spring.
The White House has answered with pageantry. On Thursday, Oct. 22, twelve days before the election, a dozen bishops prayed over Trump in the Oval Office, extending their hands over him as he bowed his head, and the White House posted the video.
A Heritage Foundation official recruited them, according to The Pillar. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops distanced itself from the meeting; its president, Archbishop Paul Coakley, had already urged Catholics on Oct. 14 to “put their faith before politics.”
On Friday, Denver Archbishop James Golka, who led the prayer, began walking the meeting back, telling his archdiocese’s newspaper he never meant the video as an endorsement of Trump.
More than 1,500 people have now signed our petition asking those 12 bishops to apologize to the people of God and to Pope Leo XIV.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers offered a laughable claim. “There has never been a greater president for Catholic Americans than President Trump,” she said.
Read the Oleshky announcement in that light.
One day after the prayer video, the White House took the most Catholic act of the month (a sick pope pleading for starving civilians) and credited it to the president’s family.
Catholic imagery is useful to this administration right up until a Catholic leader accomplishes something.
Prayer on the street corner
Jesus warned his disciples about the hypocrites “who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them” (Matthew 6:5). He told them to give alms in secret, where only the Father sees.
Leo has kept that instruction through this whole episode. He held no press conference from Gemelli. The Vatican put out a brief statement, Parolin answered a few questions from reporters, and the pope went back to his recovery.
His 17 months of quiet work on Ukraine have followed the same pattern, as did the three years Francis gave the cause before him. The beatitude Jesus gave the peacemakers has no clause for whoever issues the press release.
If the guns fall silent in Oleshky on Oct. 29 and the trucks get through, that is good news whatever name sits atop the statement. The families trapped there will not care who gets thanked.
American Catholics heading to the polls on Nov. 3 should care a great deal, because the administration courting their votes just tried to take the pope’s work and hand it to the president’s wife.
Leo did this with part of one lung gone and a cancer diagnosis less than a week old. The least the White House owes him is his name.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who spent his first days out of surgery pleading for 47 children in a city most Americans had never heard of, and with the cardinal he sent back to Moscow last month to bring prisoners and stolen children home.
Every Catholic and person of goodwill who believes the hungry deserve bread before any politician deserves applause has a place here too.
In a season when the White House treats the faith as a stage prop, this community keeps telling the truth about what the Church is doing in the world.
That is why it has become the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country, because people are hungry for the Gospel at work, told plainly, with the names left in.
If you believe Catholics and people of goodwill should stand for the dignity of the people of Oleshky against a politics that steals credit for mercy, I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Trump lies. And water is wet. And Trump will make any claim to the credit that others deserve or “gift” some of the credit to one of his lackeys and/or fellow grifters, including the second trophy wife who clearly does not give a rat’s rear about anything except enjoying her gilded life as far from Trump as she can be.
Pope Leo did "the quiet work." That says a lot, doesn't it? What a contrast with the Trumps!