Category World News

World leaders began arriving in Rome on Friday before Pope Francis’s weekend burial, a ceremony that, although more low-key than usual, is still set to be a historic event.

Pope Francis, who died on Monday from heart failure following a stroke at the age of 88, was widely popular for what many saw as his humility and compassion for marginalised people.

The passing of a pope represents a momentous shift for the Catholic Church, and burial rites and the eventual selection of a new papal leader are all usually elaborate affairs. However, the late Pope Francis had asked for a simpler funeral: His body will be buried in a simple coffin made of wood and lowered into an unmarked tomb.

Still, the funeral roll call, which features 170 foreign dignitaries, including dozens of heads of state, will make the event an extraordinary political gathering. Since not all the attendees see eye to eye, there’s also likely to be a dash of diplomatic awkwardness.

Here’s what we know about who will be attending.

What time is the pope’s funeral?

The ceremony will begin at 10am CET (08: 00 GMT) on Saturday, April 26. It will be held at St Peter’s Square in the Vatican.

Popes are usually buried beneath St Peter’s Basilica, but Santa Maria Maggiore church, a short walk from the city’s Termini central train station, is the pope’s choice as his final resting place.

During his lifetime, the church was Pope Francis’s favourite, and he visited often in his final days as his health weakened. Santa Maria Maggiore is one of Rome’s major basilicas and the first to be dedicated to the Virgin Mary back in the 14th century.

Who is going to the pope’s funeral?

Several heads of state and royals have confirmed their attendance in Rome for the funeral on Saturday. Some of them have had pleasant interactions with the pope during his lifetime, but he did not always agree with others.

US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump

Trump said the late pope was a “very good man” who “loved the world”. The United States president ordered that flags be flown at half-mast.

However, the two men did not always get on so well.

Pope Francis has criticised the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies. During Trump’s first presidency from 2017 to 2021, the pope also spoke against the US-Mexico border wall, saying a person who builds walls instead of bridges was “not Christian”.

Trump snapped back at the time, saying the pope’s questioning of his faith was “disgraceful”.

The two met in 2017 when Trump visited the Vatican. He said the pope was “really good” and that they’d had a “fantastic” meeting.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer

In a statement following the pope’s death, Starmer said he was “deeply saddened” by the news. “His leadership in a complex and challenging time for the world and the church was often courageous, yet always came from a place of deep humility”, he said.

William, Prince of Wales

Kensington Palace confirmed that Prince William will represent the UK’s royal family in Rome.

In a statement, King Charles said Pope Francis would be remembered for his compassion. “Through his work and care for both people and planet, he profoundly touched the lives of so many”, he said.

Earlier in April, the King and Queen Camilla visited the pope while on a trip to Italy.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena Zelenska

The pope called for peace in Ukraine amid the ongoing war following Russia’s invasion.

Last October, Zelenskyy met the pontiff in the Vatican – the last of several meetings between the two.

But there was also tension: In March 2024, the pope said of the Ukraine war: “When you see that you are defeated, that things are not going well, you have to have the courage to negotiate”.

Ukraine strongly criticised that viewpoint.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and First Lady Janja Lula da Silva

Brazil is home to the largest Catholic population in the world, with more than 100 million believers.

President Lula declared a seven-day mourning period to mark Pope Francis’s death on Monday. He had met him several times.

In a statement, Lula said: “We were able to share our ideals of peace, equality, and justice – ideals that the world has always needed, and will always need”.

Philippines ‘ President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and First Lady Lisa Marcos

The Philippines is another major Catholic country. Nearly 80 percent of the population identify as Catholic.

In 2015, the pope visited the capital, Manila, drawing millions to an outdoor mass there.

In a statement, President Marcos Jr described Pope Francis as a man who led “not only with wisdom but a heart open to all”.

Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and President Sergio Mattarella

Meloni met the pope several times. But while her government has often pushed policies that many see as anti-migrant, Pope Francis called for an embrace of migrants in Italy, citing the country’s low birthrate.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei

The late pope was Argentinian and was archbishop of Buenos Aires before his ascension to papal leadership. Argentina declared a week of mourning following his death.

Milei, whose right-wing policies differ sharply from the pope’s more left-leaning tendencies, visited him at the Vatican in February 2024. In the past, Milei called the pope a “leftist”.

Other VIPs include:

• UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

Europe

• French President Emmanuel Macron
• Polish President Andrzej Duda
• EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
• Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz
• Moldova’s President Maia Sandu
• Belgium’s King Philippe and Queen Mathilde
• Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia
• Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheal Martin
• Croatia’s President Zoran Milanovic
• Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics
• Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia
• Denmark’s Queen Mary
• Austria’s Chancellor Christian Stocker
• Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Rossen Jeliazkov

Asia Pacific

• India’s President Droupadi Murmu
• Bangladesh’s Interim leader Muhammad Yunus
• New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon

Latin America

• Dominican Republic President Lui Abinader
• Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa

Africa

• Democratic Republic of the Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi
• Central Africa Republic’s President Faustin-Archange Touadera
• Gabon’s President Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema
• Cape Verde’s President Jose Maria Neves

Who will NOT attend?

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be present. Both are subject to international arrest warrants on allegations of war crimes.

Is diplomatic awkwardness to be expected?

Yes, some tense encounters are expected at the gathering. US President Donald Trump’s recent trade tariffs and comments on the Ukraine and Gaza wars have contributed to an increasingly tense geopolitical climate.

Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy will be meeting in person for the first time since their very tense February encounter at the White House, during which Trump scolded Zelenskyy for not negotiating with Russia and his Vice President JD Vance lambasted him for a lack of “gratitude” towards the US. This week, Trump scolded Ukraine again for refusing to recognise Russia’s control of Crimea.

However, an alphabetical-order seating arrangement means they’ll at least not be seated next to each other.

Zelenskyy told reporters this week that he had asked for a meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the funeral. It’s not clear yet if the US has agreed.

There could also be tensions between Trump and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who has criticised Trump’s tariff war, calling it “unnecessary”.

What happened at the burial of the last Pope?

Pope John Paul II’s April 2005 funeral ceremony remains memorable for several awkward moments, as it brought a number of countries with fragile relations together. The pope led from 1978 to 2005.

A crowd jeered at former US President George Bush after his face appeared on mounted monitors because of his role in the Iraq war, which was ongoing at the time. Bush, who sat beside his rivals – Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad – was also noted to have ignored them. In previous statements, Bush had referred to the countries as an “axis of evil” and “outpost of tyranny”.

King Charles, who was then the UK’s Prince of Wales, meanwhile committed a blunder when he shook hands with Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The two countries had poor relations at the time: The UK had accused Zimbabwe of committing human rights violations by seizing land from rich white farmers to distribute to the country’s disadvantaged Black majority. Prince Charles later apologised for the friendly greeting and called Zimbabwe’s policies “abhorrent”.

Then, there was another handshake that was not supposed to happen, this time between historical enemies: Iran’s Khatami and Israeli President Moshe Katsav, causing an uproar and speculation that ties might soon be mended. Khatami dashed any hopes of this a few days later, however, when he denied that the handshake ever happened.

Tehran, Iran – Iran and the United States are expected to hold more nuclear negotiations mediated by Oman amid efforts to shape an agreement to avoid the US attacking Iran.

The Iranian delegation will arrive in Muscat on Friday evening in advance of political and, for the first time, technical talks on Saturday.

Let’s take a look at what we can expect, as well as all the latest developments and context.

Who’s at the talks?

Like the two previous rounds of talks in Italy and Oman, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff will lead the delegations.

But the experts leading the technical talks are also crucial, as they will iron out the details and wording of any agreement.

For Tehran, Araghchi’s political deputy, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, and deputy for legal and international affairs, Kazem Gharibabadi, are heading the expert-level delegation.

Takht-Ravanchi is a Western-educated diplomat who led Iran’s mission to the United Nations and was ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Gharibabadi led Iran’s representative office to international organisations in Vienna and represented the Iranian judiciary internationally.

He was also involved in indirect nuclear negotiations between the administrations of late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and former US President Joe Biden.

The chief technical expert whom US President Donald Trump selected is Michael

Anton, the newly appointed director of policy planning at the US Department of State.

Anton was a speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice during the George W Bush administration.

He also held managerial roles in the private sector, including at Citigroup and BlackRock investment firms. During the first Trump administration, he served on the National Security Council to shape government messaging.

Anton’s work may be eased by the fact that he has not yet publicly adopted a stance on Iran’s nuclear programme.

What will they discuss?

Iran has emphasised it will not discuss its defence capabilities or regional influence, but is ready for an agreement that ensures it won’t build a nuclear bomb, which it has repeatedly stated it doesn’t want.

The technical talks aim to set the steps Tehran would take to curb its nuclear programme, and how Washington and Europe would lift their devastating sanctions, which have continued despite the US calling the talks with Iran “constructive”.

Iran, for its part, wants to lift at least part of the comprehensive sanctions against its oil, banking and related industries, some of which are imposed under multiple designations.

A deal could unfreeze some of Iran’s billions of dollars of export revenue that remain blocked in foreign banks by sanctions.

Negotiators may also attempt to nail down waivers, orders to allow Iran to sell oil or access the global payments system.

Iranian officials like President Masoud Pezeshkian have gone a step further, saying Iran would even welcome direct, large-scale investment by US companies in its market, which is brimming with financial opportunity.

On the agenda will also be a cap on Iran’s uranium enrichment, which is now at up to 60 percent, a short step from the 90 percent required for a bomb.

Under the terms of an earlier nuclear agreement with world powers (the JCPOA), Iran had committed to a cap of 3.67 percent enrichment, sufficient for civilian uses like power generation.

However, when Trump unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA in 2018 and slapped punishing sanctions on Iran, Tehran started enriching at much higher levels and using more advanced reactors than those specified in the JCPOA.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog that will again monitor Iran’s commitments, is expected to send a team to Iran in the next few days for talks.

Will there be an agreement soon?

While likely to advance the positive atmosphere surrounding the talks, Saturday’s meetings are only a step among many required for any deal.

But time is of the essence, especially in the months leading up to an October deadline, &nbsp, when the 2015 nuclear deal’s “snapback” mechanism expires.

It allows any of the signatories to initiate a process to reinstate all UN sanctions on Iran in the case of significant noncompliance, like enriching uranium at levels higher than 3.67 percent. Iran wants to avoid snapback.

Iran’s Araghchi has visited China and Russia to coordinate a position, while accusing Israel of “undermining” the negotiations.

Witkoff was also in Moscow on Friday to discuss the talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Araghchi has said he is ready to visit Paris, Berlin and London for direct talks with the three European JCPOA signatories.

“I was ready to do it before Iran commenced its indirect dialogue with the U. S., but the E3 opted out”, he wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei signalled to his followers, using religious symbolism, this week, that they must not refuse a deal with the US.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Serhiy Parkhomenko’s two-storey apartment building stood right next to its twin that was struck and levelled by a Russian missile early on Thursday.

The unbearably red, eardrum-rupturing explosion killed 12, wounded 87, gouged out windows and damaged roofs in dozens of nearby buildings of the tranquil, leafy neighbourhood in northwestern Kyiv.

The shockwave caused Pakhomenko’s steel entrance door to fly through his living room, flattening a cosy armchair he or his wife used to sit in during hundreds of earlier shellings.

Luckily, they were in bed during the 1am [23:00 GMT on Wednesday] strike, the largest in Kyiv since the July 2024 bombing that damaged Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital and killed 34.

The Parkhomenkos hastily grabbed their documents and rushed outside. Serhiy also managed to drag his 68-year-old next-door neighbour out of the debris of his apartment.

“I have been really lucky,” Parkhomenko, 60, a telecommunications expert, told Al Jazeera, standing next to his broken furniture and a flatscreen TV that somehow remained intact.

What most confounds him has been the White House’s inaction over the death and destruction caused by Russia in Ukraine since Donald Trump’s re-election as United States president.

Trump turns a “blind eye” to what Russian President Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, Parkhomenko insisted.

The neighbour he had saved was sitting on a bench wrapped in a blanket, his face cut and bruised, and kept repeating: “You won’t frighten us.”

Even though Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP!” in a social media post on Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance said a day earlier that Washington would refuse to mediate peace talks if Kyiv and Moscow don’t start them within days.

“We’ve shown them the finish line,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday in the Oval Office after news of the strike on Kyiv. “We need both of them to say yes, but what happened last night with those missile strikes should remind everybody of why this war needs to end.”

Close to Parkhomenko was an American who arrived in Kyiv to teach Ukrainian servicemen English and join Dobrobat, a volunteer group that rebuilds houses all over the war-battered nation.

“I feel a moral obligation to come and help,” Tom Satterthwaite, who once led researchers on salmon spawning in Oregon’s dammed rivers, told Al Jazeera while hauling broken bricks and stucco downstairs.

He said the White House had failed to uphold its security guarantees to Kyiv, according to the Budapest Memorandum.

The 1994 deal prohibited Moscow, Washington and London from using military force against Ukraine in return for its abandonment of nuclear weapons.

Kyiv inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile from the Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse but agreed to transfer it to Russia in return for the security guarantees.

“Ukraine got the shaft on the deal,” Satterthwaite said.

Saved by her glasses

The destruction and debris after the shelling seemed shocking to some foreign volunteers. But to the head of the Dobrobat volunteer group that invites and hosts them, the scene was familiar.

“We got used to it,” Dmytro Ivanov told Al Jazeera as other volunteers ran up and down the stairs in Parkhomenko’s building. “We see it every day.”

Russia’s strike on Ukraine on Thursday involved 70 missiles and 145 explosives-laden drones.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed that the strike had targeted “military and military-adjacent sites”.

But the destroyed house next door to Parkhomenko was about a kilometre away from the Antonov Serial Production Plant, a century-old aircraft manufacturer that once produced Mriya (Dream), the world’s largest plane. The plant was burned down by Russian troops in February 2022.

But the strike on Thursday did not hit the plant if that was indeed the target. Instead, it damaged a dozen apartment buildings in the area.

Most of the victims were in the building next to Parkhomenko’s, which was almost completely levelled.

One of the survivors was Yelena, a blonde woman in her 40s whose impeccable hairdo, makeup and glasses contrasted with everything around her.

The glasses are what saved her, seconds after the strike when she moved to grab them – and her upstairs neighbour’s gas stove fell on the spot she’d just been standing in.

The blast collapsed the inner walls and ceiling of her first-floor corner apartment, while her husband Viktor saved his upstairs neighbour’s two-year-old girl from the debris.

She and her husband crawled outside to see their car mauled by the shockwave, while natural gas pipes in the building were “bursting like ropes” and neighbours yelled for help, she told Al Jazeera.

They spent hours helping them in the darkness and panic before finding out the girl’s mother had been killed.

‘There are still people down there’

At dawn, once the shock and adrenaline had worn off, Yelena realised her hair was full of broken glass, brick fragments and asbestos dust.

She rushed to her relative’s apartment to clean up and then came back to retrieve whatever was left of her belongings.

“No apartment, no car, no stuff,” she said with a sardonic smile, standing next to a dozen black garbage bags with her belongings and a microwave-sized power bank she’d been using during blackouts caused by Russia’s strikes on energy infrastructure.

Rescue workers kept excavating the debris looking for survivors, while officials registered the residents. Communal workers unfurled and cut pieces of transparent plastic film to replace broken window glass.

“There are still people down there,” Yelena said.

The strike took place on the 99th day of Trump’s second presidency whose boastful pledge to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II “within 24 hours” has proved futile.

The Kremlin has continued to produce conditions for a ceasefire – and continues the ferocious shelling of Ukrainian cities almost daily.

“They say they hit military sites, but keep striking civilian areas,” Viktor, a 59-year-old survivor whose face and scalp were cut by glass shards, told Al Jazeera as he stood next to his 90-year-old mother.

At the UN’s New York headquarters, Asaad al-Shibani, the country’s new three-star flag was raised. The new Syrian government’s action indicates that it wants to be released from Western sanctions.