Cardinal Matteo Zuppi will return to Moscow in late September for another round of talks on Ukraine. He is due to meet Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s senior foreign-policy adviser. The Russian side says humanitarian issues will remain the main focus, although the discussions are also expected to touch on politics.
The meeting will continue a channel the Holy See began developing in 2023. Zuppi has concentrated primarily on the return of children, prisoner exchanges, the repatriation of civilians, the search for missing people and the recovery of bodies — areas where communication between Kyiv and Moscow has survived despite the war.
Ushakov has confirmed that he will receive the cardinal personally. He said Zuppi had visited Russia several times and that their discussions had mainly dealt with humanitarian matters. At the same time, the Kremlin adviser acknowledged that the “political side” of the war inevitably enters such conversations.
The new visit is not an isolated initiative. In late August, the Holy See’s foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, travelled to Moscow and held talks with Sergei Lavrov and Ushakov. Preparations for another Zuppi mission were among the issues discussed.
Daycom’s analysis indicates that Vatican mediation on Ukraine matters less as an alternative peace process than as a durable humanitarian channel. It allows negotiations over specific people to continue even when the political positions of Moscow and Kyiv remain fundamentally incompatible.
That is the role the Holy See has consistently tried to preserve. During his August meetings in Moscow, Gallagher argued that the war could not be solved by military means alone, called for genuine negotiations and stressed the protection of civilians, the wounded and prisoners of war.
For the Vatican, practical humanitarian results can also serve as a way to rebuild minimal trust between the sides. Gallagher linked progress in such cases to the possibility of creating space for future diplomacy, but he did not present humanitarian arrangements as the beginning of a political settlement.
Zuppi already has an established network of contacts for that work. During his second Moscow mission in October 2024, he met not only Ushakov but also Lavrov, children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova and human rights commissioner Tatiana Moskalkova.
Those talks focused on reuniting minors with their families, exchanges involving prisoners and wounded personnel, and the return of bodies. After the visit, the Holy See said the sides had reviewed previous humanitarian work and discussed how those efforts might continue.
Ukraine has used the Vatican channel primarily on issues that cannot be resolved without direct engagement with Russian authorities. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly asked the Holy See to help return Ukrainian children transferred or deported to Russia and to assist in securing the release of Ukrainian captives.
That work has continued under Pope Leo XIV. Zuppi has remained the Holy See’s special envoy for humanitarian issues related to the war in Ukraine, allowing the mission to survive the change of pontificate.
In July 2026, the cardinal made a four-day visit to Ukraine. He visited a facility holding Russian prisoners of war, met Ukrainian officials and spoke with relatives of Ukrainians held in Russian captivity or listed as missing.
The meetings included discussions about wider prisoner exchanges, the return of civilians and the repatriation of Ukrainian children. Families of captives also urged Zuppi to seek access to Ukrainians held in Russia, similar to the access he was given to Russian prisoners in Ukraine.
That could become one of the most sensitive issues in the next Moscow round. Access by an independent international or religious representative to detention sites can give families at least some information about relatives who may have been out of contact for months.
Ukrainian families also raised the idea of an “all for all” prisoner exchange during Zuppi’s July visit. Discussions referred to roughly 7,000 Ukrainians in Russian captivity and about 4,000 Russian prisoners in Ukraine, but those figures reflected the demands of families rather than an agreement between the governments.
For that reason, expectations of a major exchange announcement in September should remain limited. No agreed list or operational formula has been made public. Humanitarian mediation is usually built from prolonged negotiations over individual cases rather than a single sweeping deal.
The question of Ukrainian children remains particularly difficult. The Holy See maintains direct contacts with both Kyiv and Moscow and has been involved in mechanisms intended to reunite minors with their families or legal guardians.
For Kyiv, this remains one of its central humanitarian demands. Ukrainian authorities continue to provide the Vatican with information about children they say were unlawfully deported or transferred and have asked church and diplomatic channels to help bring them home.
Ushakov’s reference to a political component of the coming talks is therefore significant. Humanitarian negotiations inevitably overlap with politically contested issues: the status of civilians, grounds for detention, conditions for exchanges, the transfer of children and responsibility for the war itself.
That does not make Zuppi a full political mediator between Putin and Zelenskyy. The Holy See has not presented a peace plan intended to replace official negotiating formats, and the cardinal’s work has remained predominantly humanitarian.
Yet the humanitarian channel carries political weight precisely because it continues to function. If the sides can agree on the return of a child, an exchange of prisoners or the transfer of bodies, they are maintaining technical mechanisms of communication that would also be necessary for broader agreements.
In that sense, Zuppi’s new trip is part of a wider increase in Vatican diplomatic activity. Gallagher’s August visit to Moscow followed the same logic: preserve direct contact, call for an end to the war and seek concrete results where progress remains possible.
Pope Leo XIV has also kept humanitarian issues at the centre of his engagement. In contacts with Ukrainian leaders, he has supported efforts to return prisoners and children and has called for a just and lasting peace, while the Vatican has tried to retain the ability to speak directly with both sides.
That balance can be controversial. Any mediation between an aggressor state and a country defending itself risks creating a false impression of symmetry. In humanitarian matters, however, the Vatican’s stated objective is different: not to equalize political responsibility, but to gain access to people on both sides of the front.
For Moscow, contact with the Holy See also carries diplomatic value. It gives the Kremlin a continuing line of communication with a global religious and diplomatic institution at a time when Russia’s relations with many European governments remain sharply constrained by the war.
For Ukraine, the measure of success is more concrete. What matters is not the existence of meetings in Moscow, but the number of people who actually return home: children, prisoners of war, civilians and the wounded, along with whether families can learn the fate of the missing or recover the bodies of those killed.
The outcome of the Ushakov-Zuppi meeting should therefore be judged less by diplomatic language about “dialogue” than by specific results: agreed lists, access mechanisms, new exchanges, the return of children or wider access to detention facilities.
For now, the fact that another Moscow mission is being prepared shows that after more than four years of full-scale war, one of the few durable channels between the sides continues to operate around humanitarian issues. It has not stopped the war, but for individual families its success is measured not in geopolitics, but in whether a specific person comes home.
