Looks like the Vatican has despaired of playing a diplomatic role in ending the war in Ukraine — and have also dispensed with any rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church. For months, critics outside and inside the Catholic Church have urged Pope Francis and the Holy See to speak out more forcefully against Russia’s invasion and the atrocities taking place. Until recently, however, the pontiff and the Curia have preferred to keep all their options open.

That strategy has apparently reached its end, Francis X. Rocca reports from the Vatican. Pope Francis declared this morning in his weekly public audience that the Russian invasion parallels the Holocaust, after earlier referencing Stalin’s genocide-by-famine in Ukraine:

Pope Francis on Wednesday compared the war in Ukraine to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, in his latest escalation of rhetoric on the war.

The comments risked aggravating tensions between the Vatican and Moscow following the pope’s earlier comparison of the war to Soviet-instigated genocide and his characterization of ethnic-minority Russian troops as especially cruel.

Greeting Polish pilgrims at his weekly public audience at the Vatican, the pope noted a recent commemoration of Operation Reinhardt, the 1941 German effort to exterminate the Jews of Poland, which killed about two million people.

“History repeats itself, repeats itself. Look at what is happening now in Ukraine,” the pope said, in an apparently off-the-cuff comment added to his prepared text.

The pontiff and the Vatican have spoken out against the war in the past, and not always in softer terms either. However, the Holy See has usually tried to do so without assigning specific blame to one side, a pattern that has frustrated Ukraine for months, which had hoped for a more robust condemnation of a brutal and unprovoked invasion.

As late as last week, as Rocca notes, Pope Francis defended their strategy of keeping the lines of communication open by moderating rhetoric. However, that was also when Francis first raised the analogy to the Holodomor:

The pope, speaking to a U.S. Catholic magazine, emphasized the value of diplomacy in the Vatican’s approach to the Ukraine war, as well as in regard to China.

“When I speak about Ukraine, I speak of a people who are martyred. If you have a martyred people, you have someone who martyrs them,” the pope told America magazine in an interview published Monday. “It is well known whom I am condemning. It is not necessary that I put a name and surname.”

“Why do I not name Putin? Because it is not necessary,” the pope said. “Everyone knows my stance, with Putin or without Putin.”

The pope has frequently deplored the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians during the war, but has tended to avoid explicitly blaming Russia, and has suggested that its invasion of Ukraine was provoked by the West.

In the interview, the pope said the war had a “historical antecedent” in Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s terror famine of the 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians in what the pope called a genocide—a comparison the pope also drew in other public statements last week.

Translation: Moscow hasn’t been responsive at all to the Vatican’s entreaties. Neither, apparently, has Patriarch Kirill, with whom Francis had negotiated before the war to bring Catholics and Russian Orthodox into closer alignment. Francis — like most modern popes — has sought ways to heal the schism between the Vatican and the other Orthodox branches over doctrine. Just last week, the pontiff declared in a letter that this mission was “an urgent priority” and pledged flexibility on setting a common date for Easter, one of the stumbling blocks for the last thousand years:

“The full restoration of communion among all the believers in Jesus Christ is an irrevocable commitment for every Christian, for the ‘unity of all’ (Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom) is not only God’s will but an urgent priority in today’s world,” Pope Francis said on Nov. 30.

The Pope’s letter marked the feast of St. Andrew. Pope Francis sends a message each year on the feast to the Ecumenical Patriarch, who is regarded as the successor of St. Andrew the Apostle and “first among equals” in the Eastern Orthodox Church. …

“Much attention has rightly been placed on the historical and theological reasons at the origin of our divisions. This shared study must continue and develop in a spirit that is neither polemical nor apologetic but marked instead by authentic dialogue and mutual openness,” Pope Francis said.

“We must likewise acknowledge that divisions are the result of sinful actions and attitudes which impede the work of the Holy Spirit, who guides the faithful into unity in legitimate diversity. It follows that only growth in holiness of life can lead to genuine and lasting unity.”

Patriarch Bartholomew expressed support earlier this month for finding a common date for Easter, a move that would lead to Catholics and Orthodox celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ at the same time.

Statements such as the one today will result in the exclusion of the Russian Orthodox Church from such a settlement. Thanks to Kirill’s toadying for Putin and the use of his church for genocidal ambitions, Kirill likely will have much less influence with the other Orthodox churches, probably for a long time to come. In fact, the use of the Nazis looks like a deliberate attempt to isolate Kirill, given the pretensions of both Kirill and Putin of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, which has always been a grotesque case of projection.

Will this have a direct impact on the war itself? Not a lot, except perhaps in terms of morale among Ukrainians. It does raise the stakes for Moscow and Kirill, however, in terms of their own diplomatic reach. The damage done here may take generations to undo, and that assumes that Russians feel enough shame to reverse course at some point and recognize the evil they have done.