In an apparent protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a guy stripped naked and climbed onto the altar of the Roman Catholic Church, St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
According to Reuters, citing a Vatican source, the guy, whose name has not yet been revealed, had an inscription painted on his back pleading for the salvation of Ukraine’s children.
According to local media, the man also had self-inflicted cuts on his body from his fingernails, and he was described as insane.
The event occurred on Thursday, right before the basilica closed for the day. The individual has been turned over to Italian police by Vatican guards.
Several Italian media outlets published photographs of the incident captured by tourists.
The Russian invasion began with dozens of missile strikes on cities all over Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Russian ground soldiers pushed fast and occupied significant sections of Ukraine within a few weeks, but they continue to meet fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces.
Is Russia kidnapping Ukrainian kids?
Several media outlets have reported that Russia has been abducting Ukrainian children and taking them to Russian-controlled territory.
According to the National Information Bureau of Ukraine, around 16,000 Ukrainian children have been transferred to Russia or Russian-controlled territory since the beginning of the war. According to some human rights experts, the figure could be in the hundreds of thousands. However, no incriminating evidence has been revealed thus far.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 17, this year, holding him guilty of the war crime of unlawful deportation of children to Russian-controlled territories.
Moscow, on the other hand, says that the youngsters under its supervision are either orphans or have requested emigration, while Kyiv claims that it is an attempt to obliterate Ukraine’s identity by snatching its future.
These children are from occupied places including Kherson, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.
According to other reports, the Russian military took the youngsters who had parents and then asked them to sign a release form without informing them that the children would not be returned.
It is also reported that an unknown number of children are being forcibly adopted in Russia, including those whose parents were slain by the Russian military.
Based on Russian government announcements from January, the Ukraine-based RegionalCenter for Human Rights reports that at least 400 Ukrainian orphans had been adopted by Russian families.
