ROME — Pope Francis offered prayers for Ukraine Sunday while urging the warring parties to “stop and negotiate.

During my recent journey to Canada, “I did not cease praying for the suffering and battered Ukrainian people, asking God to free them from the scourge of war,” the pontiff told pilgrims gathered in the Vatican for his weekly Angelus message.

“If one looked at what is happening objectively, considering the harm that war brings every day to those people, and even to the entire world, the only reasonable thing to do would be to stop and negotiate,” he asserted. “May wisdom inspire concrete steps toward peace.”

The pope’s appeal for negotiation signaled a different tack from that proposed by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who has insisted such negotiations imply two equal parties are in play rather than one criminal aggressor and one victim.

“What is happening in Ukraine is not a conflict, it is a crime against humanity; there is a cruel criminal and there is an innocent victim,” Archbishop Shevchuk said last week.

Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, denounced certain Western “misunderstandings” of the war, consisting in attempts to explain or justify the unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine.

“The real goal of the Russian aggression is the annihilation of the Ukrainian people,” Shevchuk said. “This is confirmed by both the ideological speeches of Putin himself, in which reference is often made to Ukrainian history, and the war crimes committed by his soldiers on our land.”

The archbishop said that what is happening in Ukraine is more than just a war, and something other than a “conflict.”

“I see that lately the Western media are talking about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict,” he said. “There is no conflict in Ukraine. Because conflict always evokes a symmetrical paradigm of discourse; conflict means that there are two groups, each of which has its own reason, and they are in conflict.”

There is in fact no such kind of reality in Ukraine, he said. There are not two sides and with some middle truth. “There is a criminal, one who attacks, and there is his victim.”

In place of this conflict paradigm, the archbishop proposed a global resolve of “zero tolerance” toward unprovoked Russian aggression in Ukraine.