Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward says First Lady Melania Trump has essentially taken credit for what he describes as Pope Leo XIV’s work to broker a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

According to the White House, hundreds of people were evacuated on Friday from Oleshky, an occupied city in southern Ukraine, under a ceasefire agreement it says was negotiated by Melania Trump — in a conflict that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ward, however, told Sean Rameswaram, co-host of Vox’s “Today, Explained” podcast, that the Pope built the bones of the agreement.

“It’s possible she had a role. I’m going to personally, without too much reporting, say that it was probably more Pope Leo,” Ward said.

“Melania stole Pope Leo’s ceasefire?” Rameswaram asked.

“I think a little bit. … The Russians are very much saying, ‘look at Melania Trump, look at how important she was to all this.’ And if I’m the Russians, I would love to be saying things like that because then President Trump feels like the Russians are being very generous towards my wife and to my family, and therefore I side with them,” Ward replied.

“It feels very convenient that the Russians are pumping that up and that even the White House is pumping up Melania Trump’s influence,” he added, while noting that he did not want to fully discredit the First Lady. “I’m sure she did work on this.”

Ward said that while it is “totally possible” that Melania Trump is the driving force behind the ceasefire, “there’s just a lot of skepticism out there about whether Kyiv and Moscow were brought to the table and browbeaten by the First Lady.”

“Again, very possible, but both sides, being Ukraine and Russia, have an incentive to play up her role,” he said.

The dispute comes as President Donald Trump’s standing among Catholics has collapsed ahead of November’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress, even as he continues to square off against Leo — the first American-born pope, elected in May 2025 — and assert the White House’s will over the Holy See.

Catholic Church correspondent Christopher Hale reports that Trump won the Catholic vote in 2024 by twelve points, 55 percent to Kamala Harris’s 43 percent. Four years earlier, the same group had split almost evenly. But with six days to go before the midterms, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center now finds that only 30 percent of American Catholics approve of the job Trump is doing.

“For most of his first year back in office, the decline came gradually. Trump’s approval among Catholics fell to 42 percent by April 2025 and bounced around the low 40s through the summer and fall; by January 2026 it sat at 39 percent,” Hale wrote. “… Since then, Trump’s Catholic approval has fallen another nine points, from 39 percent to 30. With white Catholics the slide runs steeper: 13 points, from 52 percent to 39, nearly double what he lost with them over his entire first year.”

Pew does not explain the collapse, but Hale attributed the slide to another Trump-era war: his voluntary attack on Iran.