With the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Cyril, changed his official rhetoric regarding Ukraine. Previously, Cyril and his team tried to somehow avoid sharp corners in the issue of Russian aggression against Ukraine, but now the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church justifies and supports the crimes committed by Russian occupiers.
The personal pro-active stance of Cyril is worth noting in this case. Previously, he mostly remained in a kind of isolation at a “Skete” special facility, guarded by the Federal Protection Service, but now he often addresses a larger large audience in the Church of Christ the Savior. So Cyril rather abruptly came out of his self-isolation.
Such an interesting development leads to assume that Cyril has been clearly tasked with convey information favorable to the Kremlin about Russia’s actions in Ukraine, adding a religious tint to it. Against this background, Cyril himself turns out to be an accomplice to the Russian government’s crimes.
In my earlier reports, I have noted that in his sermons, Cyril tries to sacralize Russian invasion, to add an appropriate spiritual meaning to it, as if it were not just a military conflict, but a conscious struggle between good and evil. At the same time, good – in his version of events – is represented by the Russian occupiers, while Ukraine and the whole civilized Western world side with evil.
The lion’s share of his speeches is dedicated precisely to this. Almost all of them have the same leitmotif – this is the “holy war” for true human and Christian values.
Cyril’s sermons
Sermons performed by ROC’s Cyril are a clear example of conspiracy and attempts to sacralize Putin’s war.
In one of his first sermons, he said that the people of Donbas were being killed because they resisted “new sinful values imposed by world power.” All those who support these latest trends, according to Cyril, will be to the left of Christ on Judgment Day, that is, go to hell.
Cyril also openly stated from the church pulpit that any country has every right to attack another if there are threats to its security. Thus, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church echoed all the messages that had been voiced the Kremlin’s mouthpieces over the last months prior to the invasion of Ukraine.
Last Sunday, Cyril dedicated his sermon to the relationship between the Church and government, in which he focused especially on the government knowingly violating the rights of the Church and affecting the internal affairs and life of the Church itself. Reflecting on the times of ancient Byzantium, he gradually moved on to events in Ukraine, where, in his opinion, the government also interferes in church affairs, trying to break its unity with the Moscow Patriarchate.
The sermon climaxed in presenting the icon of the Virgin to the head of the Russian Guard, Viktor Zolotov. This is the icon that supposedly saved Russian soldiers from death during World War 1 and helped the Russian army win many battles. That sermon, together with a public and demonstrative act of handing this icon, was a direct testament to Cyril’s blessing on killing Ukrainians. The comment by General Zolotov about the “Nazis” in Ukraine and the fact that the icon will protect the Russian army and accelerate “OUR (!) Victory” testified to this even more and finally tore the masks off Cyril.
The video of the sermon was widely circulated across online platforms and no refutations followed from the Moscow Patriarchate. Moreover, no official comments were offered by the ROC branch in Ukraine. Such silence was another piece of evidence that the ROC and the Kremlin are acting as one in this war. Each of them performs a separate function. The Kremlin finances it and issues criminal orders, the army advances, while the ROC justifies aggression, and, most importantly, offers an ideological, spiritual, and theological content for the crimes being committed.
To this end, Cyril applies a variety historical parallels, which he always imposes onto modern events in an interpretation favorable for Kremlin criminals. He dedicated the last Sunday’s sermon precisely to this, giving several examples of how church leaders who are recognized as saints by the Russian Church (!) blessed people to go to war with enemies. Perhaps he was trying to justify the aforementioned blessing of the Russian Guard or perhaps he was preparing the ground for his upcoming public blessing of Putin’s actions.
Involving saints into this agenda is another attempt to sacralize the war that Russia has unleashed in Ukraine. However, all the examples he cites are a clear and deliberate manipulation of historical facts that cannot be compared to the current actions of Russian occupiers. After all, the mentioned episode involving Sergei of Radonezh and Dmitriy of Don had completely different preconditions than those that preceded the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At that time, Moscow had long been under the influence of the horde, while Moscow princes received from the horde the license to rule, the so-called “label.”
Now no one is influencing Russia today, it is not under oppression, and its leader is not appointed by outsiders. Instead, the Kremlin leadership aspires to become another horde, and brutal massacres of civilians are just another confirmation of that.
Similarly, the example of Patriarch Hermogenes cannot be compared with modern events. Then the Moscow kingdom, through the fault of its leaders, found itself in a so-called “troubled time” from which no one could find a way out. That is why they agreed to the reign of a Polish ruler. Now the Russian regime is so “stable” that it elects the same leader over and over, and he keeps craving for even more power.
The mention of Patriarch Tikhon seems inappropriate in general. After all, he fought against the Bolsheviks, and opposed the Soviet Union, that very Union that the modern Kremlin now seeks to re-establish. Therefore, all the examples of cooperation between the church and government, offered by Cyril, are a deliberate manipulation and outright distortion of historical facts.
As we know, no government, especially that of Ukraine, has attacked or even threatened to attack Russia. Everything that is happening is solely the fruit of Putin’s painful imagination. The threat of an attack was deliberately invented by the Kremlin to disguise its own plans to seize foreign territory. The reason for such an evil intention is the sin of pride and power-craving of the Kremlin leadership.
Terrorism of the “Russian army” blessed by the ROC
Now it is worth taking a closer look at the consequences of the Russian army’s actions, blessed by Cyril.
Unable to defeat the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Russian occupiers resorted to exterminating Ukrainian women, children, and the elderly.
If we analyze the events that unfolded over the three weeks of heroic defense put up by the Ukrainian people against Russian invaders, it becomes obvious that the “glorious” Russian army, fortunately, has failed to achieve any significant success.
But, as it turned out, the Kremlin is unable to accept or admit defeat. Out of helplessness and hopelessness, the Russians urgently began to look for an enemy that was much easier to defeat than the Ukrainian Army. Apparently, the “highly spiritual” Russians who profess “traditional values” have found such enemies in Ukrainian women, children, and the elderly.
Probably, it was the inability of these population strata to repel the aggressor that caused such unbridled rage, with which the Russians are now bombing residential areas, shooting civilians, killing children. There are already plenty of examples of such infernal bloodthirstiness of Kremlin henchmen. Here are just a few examples.
On February 27, the invaders fired on the central part of Chernihiv, injuring a children’s hospital and a dental clinic, administrative buildings, and high-rise apartment blocks. Russian occupiers fired on residential areas with Grad multiple rocket launchers. On March 3, an airstrike by several unguided bombs killed 47 civilians. According to international experts, the Russian army could have used OFZAB-500 incendiary bombs, which is a violation of an international convention and is considered a war crime.
On February 28, the Russian occupiers shelled residential areas of Kharkiv, using Grad MLR systems, killing dozens and injuring hundreds.
As of March 7, according to Deputy Mayor Volodymyr Matsokin, the city of Izium, Kharkiv region, has been almost destroyed. There is a humanitarian catastrophe in town- there is no food, water, light, gas, or mobile communication. On March 8, the occupiers bombed the Izium hospital, while in the Kharkiv Ecopark, Russians killed volunteers who came to feed animals.
In the town of Kreminna, Luhansk region, the Russian tank shot at point-blank a nursing home for the elderly, killing 56 and abducting another 15 people.
On March 13, in the village of Borivske outside Severodonetsk, the occupiers killed an acclaimed volunteer, Oleksandr Kononov, in his own home. He was a disabled man, praised for his active pro-Ukrainian stance. He was simply gunned down in his wheelchair.
A boarding school for visually impaired children Kryshtalyk, a hospital, and three schools were destroyed in enemy shelling of Rubizhne. On March 15, Russian troops opened fire on an evacuation bus carrying people from Rubizhne, Luhansk Oblast.
On March 6, a Russian tank drove over a private vehicle on a motorway between the villages of Nesterianka and Myrne in the Orikhiv district, Zaporizhia region. Before destroying the vehicle carrying people who were trying to flee the warzone, the Russians ordered it to stop at the roadside. As a result of the inhumane crime, two men were killed and a boy died in the burning car.
On March 8, near Makariv, a Russian IFV opened fire on a car carrying an elderly couple. There was a “disabled driver” sticker on the vehicle.
On March 15, in the village of Mokhnatyn outside Chernihiv, Russian occupiers deliberately shot dead three local teenagers (two were 17 and one – 19).
As of March 15, about 1,800 civilians had been confirmed dead amid the siege of Mariupol by the Russian occupiers. The actual death toll, according to Mayor’s adviser Petro Andriushchenko, was approaching 20,000.
On March 16, Russian occupation forces dropped a bomb on the Mariupol Drama Theater, which served as a shelter for more than a thousand civilians hiding from shelling. The words “CHILDREN” were clearly inscribed in large letters around the building, to be seen from above. Therefore, this bombing cannot be called a “mistake”.
On March 16, the occupiers killed nearly a dozen people queuing for bread in one of Chernihiv districts.
This list of crimes is far from exhaustive. However, if we assume that the Moscow Patriarch Cyril was not informed about the atrocities of the Russian “glorious” army, he was aware of the following crimes, as they concern the bombing of religious buildings and monasteries, including those run by the UOC-MP, the organization subordinated to him personally.
Recently, the State Service for Ethnic Policies and Freedom of Conscience of Ukraine reported that, since the beginning of a full-scale war in Ukraine, at least 28 places of worship have been destroyed or damaged, that’s not counting the adjacent premises. The vast majority of them are Orthodox churches.
Among the temples destroyed, at least a third belonged to the UOC-MP. It is known that at least one of its priests was killed, as well as at least three OCU clerics.
Patriarch Cyril is an accomplice to Russia’s war crimes
Cyril deliberately chose the side of the criminal and voluntarily became an accomplice to the heinous war crimes committed by the Russian army.
The justification of these sins by Cyril means his conscious participation in them. This is not what the spiritual leader and head of the Church should do. His duty is to expose sins, not to encourage their commission and multiplication. He must speak the truth and testify to the truth, but instead, he spreads a conscious lie, which he deliberately uses to mislead his faithful.
By undertaking such actions, Cyril becomes none other than an accomplice to the Russia’s horrific crimes! Against this background, Cyril does not look like a pastor of the church, but as an agent of Russian secret services, a criminal whose goal and task is to provide ideological justification for any actions of the Russian government, no matter how horrible and bloody they are!
All this shows that the ROC does not serve God, but rather acts in the interests of the Russian government machine. In fact, it is one of the branches of Russian propaganda, which operates under the guise of religious figures, being able to affect human souls. It is worth noting that all this is done consciously and voluntarily, and not only by Cyril himself, but also by a number of his bishops and priests, who also approve of the actions of Russian occupiers.
Such interaction between the church and government is purely wrong – in fact, it conceives new heresy. For now, the church does not represent the truth of Christ, but adjusts it to the whims of the criminal regime. From the Russian church pulpits, white is called black, and black is called white. And all this is happening against the background of mass crimes, the killing of the innocent, and the bombing of temples. Can the true Church approve and bless any of this? Of course not! The Church can and should bless the efforts to defend Motherland, not to attack anyone.
The “best defense is an attack” principle that Russia now preaches is not a Christian one. It is alien to the Church, but it appears to be normal to the ideological branch of Russian secret services. And the Russian “Orthodox Church” is precisely that.
From now on, “Patriarch Cyril” and the Moscow Patriarchate must be perceived and treated not as religious figures, but as Russia’s political instrument disguised as an Orthodox church.
Source: religious expert Oleksandr Yefremenko
