Pope Francis inadvertently plunged himself into the culture wars this week following unusually warm words for Russia’s cultural heritage spoken to a group of Russian Catholic youths, drawing swift  condemnation from Ukraine. 

The incident comes along with  shifting tides of opinion about the geographic contours of a possible, though not imminent, denouement of the war in Ukraine — and underscore how with a few exceptions, timeworn animosities will likely stain the European map for the foreseeable future. They dovetail with another unfortunate pairing: absence of strong leadership and lack of diplomatic resolve.  

Had the latter items been in greater supply some 20 months ago, would Russia have been deterred from sending troops across the border into Ukraine? No one knows, but Germany was too busy gobbling up cheap Russian gas — something President Trump warned about — and no politician in the European Union could match the British premier, Boris Johnson, for prescience when it came to calling out President Putin’s plans for Ukraine before he actually pounced. 

Now, whether it’s the rise of Brics or the latest audacious construction project in Saudi Arabia, the world seems to be itching to move on as European infighting casts its relevance in question. Pope Francis was accused of spewing pro-Russian imperialist propaganda when he said, “Don’t forget your identity: You are the heirs of the great Russia, the great Russia of the saints, the kings, the great Russia of Peter the Great, of Catherine II, of this great and cultured Russian empire of such great humanity; never neglect this heritage, you are the heirs of the great mother Russia, step forward with this. And thank you — thank you for your way of being, for your way of being Russians.”

He delivered those words via a video message as part of Russia’s Youth Day at St. Petersburg on August 25. Thanks to the Internet those remarks, though not intended to be political, ricocheted from Rome to Kyiv and back. Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman, Oleg Nikolenko, responded by stating, “The Kremlin justifies the murders of thousands of Ukrainians and Ukrainian women, the destruction of hundreds of Ukrainian cities and villages with such imperialist propaganda, ‘spiritual bonds’ and the ‘necessity’ to save the ‘Great Mother Russia.’”

Mr. Nikolenko added, “It is indeed a pity that the ideas of a Russian great power, which are in fact the cause of Russia’s chronic aggression, consciously or unconsciously, come from the lips of the pope, whose mission, in our opinion, is precisely to open the eyes of the Russian youth on the destructive course of the current Russian leadership.”

There is no question that the pope’s remarks were tone-deaf, especially considering that Mr. Putin admires Peter the Great so much he reportedly has a statuette of the tsar on board his recently refurbished superyacht, the Killer Whale. As Corriere della Sera reported, the comments were scrubbed from the Vatican’s official media, but the video was already making the rounds at Moscow and Kyiv. 

On Tuesday the Holy See’s press office issued a statement that read in part, “the Pope intended to encourage young people to preserve and promote all that is positive in the great cultural and spiritual heritage of Russia, and certainly not to glorify imperialist logic and government figures, who were mentioned to indicate certain historical periods of reference.”

Pope Francis has been opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine almost since the first moment of hostilities. The Vatican has more credibility in terms of carving out a role as an international mediator between Russia and Ukraine than, say, Saudi Arabia or even Turkey. As a measure of the Vatican’s enduring importance, earlier this month the pope held a private meeting with General Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

President Zelensky has sought the Vatican’s endorsement of Ukraine’s 10-point peace plan calling for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the withdrawal of Russian troops, and Francis has previously called on Mr. Zelensky to seek a peaceful resolution of the conflict. 

At 86, Francis is probably not going to apologize for remarks that were taken out of context, but it is unlikely that the jaws of cancel culture will reach Vatican City. Yet internecine squabbles on the Continent have already spilled over to American shores. Consider that a Russian soprano, Anna Netrebko, has sued New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, after the company fired her following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Some of the fighting in Ukraine has migrated to the diplomatic ring following Mr. Zelensky’s remarks about Crimea. On Sunday he told a Ukrainian journalist, “When we are at the administrative borders of Crimea, I think it is possible politically to force the demilitarization of Russia on the territory of the peninsula.”

One development in that direction could be the renewal of the state concession that would allow the Russian naval base at Sevastopol to remain active for a certain number of years. Russia’s navy was able to remain in Crimea thanks to a protocol signed in April 2010 by the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych — later ousted with the Maidan revolt in 2014 — and by the Russian president at the time, Dmitry Medvedev. Ukraine extended the Sevastopol concession until 2042 in exchange for a substantial discount on gas supplies. 

The status of that concession was thrown into disarray with Mr. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Western pressure for more meaningful moves on conflict resolution is mounting. This is happening even as Ukraine and Russia continue to trade blows, whether by mutual drone strikes that have increased in ferocity or on the southern frontlines. 

When real combat mixes with warring cultural narratives month after month,  Europe’s economic punch and political cohesiveness, which is to say its strength, invariably suffers. Its bloody past clearly not behind it yet, the Continent’s utility in squaring off against other challenges to come, in Asia and elsewhere, looks less clear by the day.