“Leo XIV was involved with this for months.”

This is totally dishonest. The White House didn’t work with Pope Leo XIV on securing this temporary ceasefire. Leo XIV was involved with this for months. Even while he was in the hospital recovering from lung cancer surgery, he called Putin and then Zelenskyy. The pope wasn’t a supporting actor. He was the protagonist.

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) October 24, 2026

This is totally dishonest. The White House didn’t work with Pope Leo XIV on securing this temporary ceasefire.

Leo XIV was involved with this for months.

Even while he was in the hospital recovering from lung cancer surgery, he called Putin and then Zelenskyy.

The pope wasn’t a supporting actor. He was the protagonist.

In today’s essay, I trace how Pope Leo XIV pressed Vladimir Putin on Oleshky from his hospital bed, and how that work began on his first Sunday as pope, when he asked that Ukraine’s children be returned to their families. The White House waited a week and then gave the credit to Melania Trump. With the midterms 10 days away and Trump’s approval among Catholics at 30 percent, it’s easy to see why. https://t.co/el1w0T347L

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) October 24, 2026

In today’s essay, I trace how Pope Leo XIV pressed Vladimir Putin on Oleshky from his hospital bed, and how that work began on his first Sunday as pope, when he asked that Ukraine’s children be returned to their families.

The White House waited a week and then gave the credit to Melania Trump. With the midterms 10 days away and Trump’s approval among Catholics at 30 percent, it’s easy to see why.

This is the sleaziest form of “stolen valor” imaginable.

Pope Leo XIV phoned Vladimir Putin on Friday, Oct. 16, from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, three days after surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung.

He had one request. Leo asked the Russian president to halt the fighting in Oleshky, an occupied city on the Dnipro River where roughly 1,700 civilians, 47 of them children, have been cut off from food and medicine (the count comes from Danielle Bell, who leads the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine).

Moscow answered within hours. “The Vatican’s intention to help create the conditions necessary to ensure the safety of the town’s population and to organise vital supplies has been supported,” the Kremlin said, adding that “it has been agreed to cooperate on this matter.”

One week later, the White House announced that the truce belonged to Melania Trump.

Pope Leo began working on this initiative upon his election to the papacy.

On May 11, 2025, three days after his election, he used his first Sunday address from the loggia of St. Peter’s to tell the world, “I carry in my heart the sufferings of the beloved Ukrainian people.” Then he made a demand that has defined his diplomacy ever since: “Let all the prisoners be freed and the children return to their own families.”

He phoned Volodymyr Zelensky the next day, and the Ukrainian president said afterward that they discussed “the thousands of Ukrainian children deported by Russia.”

After his inauguration Mass on May 18, Leo received Zelensky in person; the Ukrainian president gave him an icon of the Mother of God painted on a piece of an artillery box from Izium, a gift he said stood for the children Russia had taken.

On June 4, Leo called Putin and urged Russia to make “a gesture that would favor peace.”

Leo was carrying forward the work of Pope Francis.

Pope Francis began this work before him. On Feb. 25, 2022, the day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Francis went to the Russian Embassy to the Holy See and spent half an hour there to express his concern about the war. In May 2023, he named Cardinal Matteo Zuppi his envoy, and Zuppi’s trips to Moscow focused on reuniting deported Ukrainian children with their families and on prisoner exchanges. Vatican News has reported that a number of those children made it home through the channel Zuppi opened.

His funeral carried the same work forward. On April 26, 2025, Trump and Zelensky sat face to face on two chairs inside St. Peter’s Basilica, their first meeting since their Oval Office blowup in February, and Zelensky said afterward that it could prove historic.

Zuppi stayed on the job under Leo.

And then Melania heard about it. Or someone in the White House did.

The cardinal describes the mission as one “entrusted to me initially by Pope Francis and subsequently confirmed by Pope Leo XIV,” and he flew to Moscow a third time from Sept. 28 to 30, where he met Ukrainian prisoners of war for the first time. That was the same month Mrs. Trump’s office says Oleshky first came to her attention

Leo announced his cancer diagnosis on Sunday, October 11. 

The Vatican said he resumed his duties on Thursday, and the call to Moscow came the next afternoon. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, told reporters the call was Leo’s initiative; a senior Vatican source told America that the Holy See placed it. Putin, for his part, wished the pope a speedy recovery.

Leo walked out of Gemelli on Saturday without help. Before getting into his car, he stopped to talk with a Ukrainian family, and a 13-year-old Ukrainian girl handed him a stuffed toy.

On Monday, Oct. 19, he called Zelensky — their third phone conversation of the pontificate. He raised the “grave situation” in Oleshky and briefed the Ukrainian president on the request he had put to Putin. “We are preparing decisions,” Zelensky said afterward.

The order of events is plain

Plainly stolen, that is, by the White House.

The pope moved Moscow first, from a hospital bed, and he had Kyiv on the phone two days after his discharge. Two days after that, his doctors said he needs no further cancer treatment.

The White House announced on October 23 that Melania had been working on the agreement for months, although it also said she only heard of the situation in Oleshky in September. But Putin had committed to the Okeshky plan on October 16th.

I would say Leo is wise not to lower himself to Trump’s level (it’s clear he gave his wife credit so he couldn’t be questioned about it, and she won’t be). Christopher Hale has a slightly different analysis, one I don’t disagree with:

Jesus warned his disciples about the hypocrites “who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them” (Matthew 6:5). He told them to give alms in secret, where only the Father sees.

Leo has kept that instruction through this whole episode. He held no press conference from Gemelli. The Vatican put out a brief statement, Parolin answered a few questions from reporters, and the pope went back to his recovery.

His 17 months of quiet work on Ukraine have followed the same pattern, as did the three years Francis gave the cause before him. The beatitude Jesus gave the peacemakers has no clause for whoever issues the press release.

If the guns fall silent in Oleshky on Oct. 29 and the trucks get through, that is good news whatever name sits atop the statement. The families trapped there will not care who gets thanked. (emphasis added)

American Catholics heading to the polls on Nov. 3 should care a great deal, because the administration courting their votes just tried to take the pope’s work and hand it to the president’s wife.

Leo did this with part of one lung gone and a cancer diagnosis less than a week old. The least the White House owes him is his name.

For Trump, giving at all is for suckers, and giving in secret is just an opportunity to take credit. There really is no bottom to this administration.