(Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, discussed humanitarian issues linked to the 2-1/2-year-old conflict in Ukraine, his ministry said late on Wednesday.

“The sides noted constructive development in the Russia-Vatican dialogue, in terms of relations between states and churches and mutual actions in the humanitarian sphere in the context of the Ukrainian crisis,” the ministry statement said.

The ministry said talks with the cardinal, in effect Pope Francis’s number two in the Vatican hierarchy, also focused on the “reasons for the geopolitical crisis, a direct consequence of the consistent anti-Russian policies of Western countries”.

Their meeting took place in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session.

A papal envoy has visited Kyiv and Moscow as part of efforts to bring home Ukrainian children authorities in Kyiv say have been deported by Russia.

Francis has repeatedly called for peace and deplored attacks that caused loss of life during the conflict.

Kyiv’s relations with the Vatican, underpinned by the presence in Ukraine of some 5 million Eastern Rite Catholics, have been strained at times due to a number of Francis’s statements since Russian forces invaded in February 2022.

(Reporting by Ron Popeski; editing by Jonathan Oatis)