Pope Leo and Putin hold 'constructive' call on Ukraine war, says Kremlin
Vladimir Putin discussed the war in Ukraine with Pope Leo in a telephone call on Wednesday, June 4, with the Kremlin claiming the Russian president wanted peace through diplomacy. Putin, however, also claimed "the regime in Kyiv is betting on an escalation of the conflict and carrying out acts of sabotage against civil infrastructure on Russian territory," it said in a statement.
In the phone call, Putin "reaffirmed his interest in bringing about peace by political and diplomatic means," the Kremlin said, describing the call as "constructive." He did so "underlining that in order to come to a definitive, just and comprehensive settlement to the crisis, it was necessary to eliminate the deep-seated causes."
That evoked language typically used to refer to a mix of sweeping demands regularly put forward by Russia, including limiting Ukraine's military, banning the country from joining NATO and massive territorial concessions. Ukraine has rejected those calls and demanded an unconditional ceasefire, which Russia refuses.
The afternoon phone call was the first between the US-born pope and Putin since Leo became head of the world's Catholics last month. After taking office, the pontiff offered to mediate between leaders of countries at war – an offer that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni later said meant hosting Ukraine peace talks at the Vatican. But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov cast doubt on the idea, saying "it would be a bit inelegant for Orthodox countries to discuss (the conflict), on Catholic ground."
On Wednesday, Putin thanked Leo for "his willingness to contribute to a settlement" of the conflict, the Kremlin said.
'Seek solutions to the conflict'
The Vatican said in a statement that during the call with Putin, "the pope made an appeal for Russia to make a gesture that favours peace." Leo also "underlined the importance of dialogue for the realisation of positive contacts between the parties and to seek solutions to the conflict."
The two men talked about the humanitarian situation and the need to favour aid where necessary, and the exchange of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine.
In addition, the pope offered his thanks for Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a close supporter of Putin, for his good wishes at the start of his pontificate. He "emphasized how common Christian values can be a light that helps to seek peace, defend life and seek true religious freedom," the Vatican statement said.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Holy See has been at odds with Kirill, who has described the conflict as a "holy war."
More than three years into Russia's grinding invasion, which has cost tens of thousands of lives, Russia and Ukraine have opened direct talks searching for a way to end what has become Europe's largest conflict since World War II.
At a second round of negotiations on Monday, the two sides swapped documents with their terms for a ceasefire and agreed to a large-scale prisoner exchange, which could go forward this weekend.
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In a lawsuit filed in the California Superior Court, Reddit claims Anthropic used automated bots to access Reddit's content despite being asked not to do so, and "intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent". Anthropic said in a statement that it disagreed with Reddit's claims "and will defend ourselves vigorously". "AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data," said Ben Lee, Reddit's chief legal officer, in a statement to the Associated Press. Reddit's suit is the latest against the AI company. Another suit from major music publishers alleges that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. Yet, this lawsuit deals with the alleged breach of Reddit's terms of use and unfair competition, unlike the other suits that claim copyright infringement. Reddit has licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI, and other companies that pay to train their AI systems on the public commentary of Reddit's more than 100 million daily users. Those agreements "enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content," Lee said. Much like other AI companies, Anthropic has relied heavily on websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit, that are deep troves of written materials that can help teach an AI assistant the patterns of human language. A 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cited in the lawsuit shows that company researchers identified the subreddits or forums that contained the highest quality AI training data. These included subreddits on gardening, history, relationship advice, or thoughts people have in the shower. Anthropic in 2023 argued in a letter to the U.S. Copyright Office that the "way Claude was trained qualifies as a quintessentially lawful use of materials," by making copies of information to perform a statistical analysis of a large body of data.
