Shevchuk Hands Pope Leo Prisoner List: Ukraine POW Names Delivered at Vatican

Every name on the list came from a mother, a wife, or a child who had cried while handing it over. That is how Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk collects these lists — not from databases, but from tears — and on October 23, 2026, he placed hundreds of them into the hands of Pope Leo XIV.

Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, met Pope Leo at the Vatican's Apostolic Palace in what was his fifth audience with the pontiff. According to a statement from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, reported by Vatican News, the Major Archbishop handed the Pope a list of hundreds of prisoners of war held in Russia, bearing the prayers and gratitude of the Ukrainian people.

Shevchuk has described before how the lists are gathered, and his words explain why a piece of paper can carry such weight.

Every time I visit our communities, parents, mothers, wives and children come to me and with tears in their eyes ask for the salvation of their loved ones. That's when I get these names. The names of our soldiers who are in captivity are now in your hands. Our people have a deep feeling that from now on their names are also in God's hands.

Behind each name on the list, as Shevchuk has noted, are specific individuals and families waiting for their loved ones to return. The lists are not taken from open sources. They are collected face to face, in cities and villages across Ukraine, from relatives who approach him during meetings with Ukrainian communities.

Shevchuk Pope Leo Meeting: Gratitude for the Oleshky Truce Appeal

The audience was about more than the list. Shevchuk expressed particular gratitude for the Pope's recent telephone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which the Pope appealed for a truce in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, where civilians face a desperate shortage of food, water and medicine.

The conversation with President Putin took place while the Pope was in Rome's Gemelli Hospital, recovering from his October 13 lung surgery — a detail that gives the appeal its own poignancy. A pope in a hospital bed, calling a president to beg for a besieged city. Shevchuk thanked him for his attention to what he called the humanitarian catastrophe in Oleshky, and for the Holy See's continuing appeals for an end to the war.

The diplomacy bore fruit within days. Russia and Ukraine confirmed a local ceasefire in Oleshky beginning Tuesday, October 27, to allow aid deliveries and evacuations, with Ukraine's human rights commissioner crediting mediation involving the United States. Shevchuk had also thanked the Pope for contacting both presidents and praised Cardinal Zuppi's visit to Ukrainian prisoners in a Russian detention centre.

Ukraine POW List Vatican: Aid Mission Follows the Audience

The Holy See announced an immediate response to the audience. Papal Almoner Archbishop Luis Marin de San Martin will travel to Ukraine from October 27 to 30, delivering food, medicine and relief supplies to Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro and Fastiv, and conveying the Pope's personal closness to the people there.

Among the gifts Shevchuk presented were joint Ukrainian-Vatican commemorative stamps, a photographic collection documenting the Ukrainian community's meetings with the Pope, and "Hemingway Knows Nothing", a book authored by Ukrainian veteran Arthur Dron. Before concluding, Shevchuk briefed the Pope on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's recent Synod of Bishops, which addressed priestly vocations amid war-driven demographic challenges, and wished the pontiff a continued full recovery.

For readers following the Vatican's role in the war, this audience connects with Pope Leo's October 25 appeal for Yemen and for the victims of Hamoud and the Assisi peace gathering of faith leaders. The pattern is consistent: a pope who uses his voice for besieged cities and his almoner for the roads into them, while a Ukrainian archbishop carries the names of the missing from village to Vatican.

What makes the list different from a diplomatic note is its origin. These names were not compiled by an intelligence service or copied from a database. They were handed over by grieving relatives, one conversation at a time, to a church leader who carried them to Rome.

That chain — from a mother's tears in a Ukrainian village to the Pope's desk — is the reason the Vatican's prisoner work carries moral weight that formal negotiations often lack, and it is why Shevchuk keeps making the journey. The same human chain runs through other stories of faith under fire, from the Intersociety report on Christians killed in Africa to the Pope's appeal for Yemen.

The list is now in the Pope's hands, and the almoner is on his way to Ukraine. But the names on that list are still in cells, and their mothers are still waiting by phones that rarely ring. The open question, as the Oleshky ceasefire begins on Tuesday, is whether a truce for one city can become a door for hundreds of prisoners — and whether the next list Shevchuk carries to Rome will be shorter than this one?

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.