The position of Patriarch Cyril regarding what Russian authorities call a “special military operation” (hereinafter – SMO) in Ukraine is unacceptable not only for the majority of Christians in the world, but also for the free part of the ROC flock.
Evidence of this is a letter with a call for active peacemaking signed by more than 250 clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church, a spontaneous refusal to commemorate the patriarch in ROC’s Ukrainian dioceses and in some of its foreign parishes, and statements by the Synod and head of the Ukrainian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, who called for the Patriarch of Moscow to start “asking Putin questions.”
Nova’s sources in the Moscow Patriarchate agree that the patriarch knew about the SMO in advance.
If this is so, then his words, spoken in an address to the soldiers on the “peaceful” day of February 23, take up a new meaning: “There are no wars without victims.” In his resolution dated March 1, Cyril called the non-acceptance of the SMO a political preference. On Holy Sunday, March 6, he already spoke about the “real war”, finding a completely phantasmagorical explanation of what is happening, so to say, “from a religious point of view.”
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church considers the reason behind the SMO “the deterioration of the political situation in Donbas,” where attempts to “destroy Donbas” allegedly continued for the past eight years.
Do you think this is the “Russian world” or democracy of the “people’s republics”? No, it turns out that the main value of Donbas, which justifies the current actions of the Russian Federation, is the refusal to hold “gay parades”!
It’s because of this that people are dying, while the Orthodox living in the territory controlled by Ukraine, have chosen for themselves the “path of least resistance,” and “follow the path shown to them by the powerful of this world.” The patriarch graciously admitted that he does not condemn them and does not invite anyone to go to the cross. However, he acknowledged only the suffering of the “brothers in Donbas,” with whom “we cannot part,” and called to pray only for the “long-suffering Donbas land.”
Metropolitan Korniliy (Tytov), head of the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church (ROOBC), spoke even less “diplomatically” on the same Forgiven Sunday, when the Orthodox Church calls for reconciliation.
This religious figure openly expresses what Patriarch Cyril only hints at. Korniliy fully supported and approved the actions of “our army,” saying that in Ukraine people were killed “just because you think and speak Russian. The Slavic peoples do not want to tolerate this lawlessness.” He calls on the Ukrainian side to “lay down their arms” and “stop the genocide, madness.”
Such a position means for the ROOBC the loss of 60 of its parishes in Ukraine and a break with the fraternal church, the center of which is in Romania.
Evidence of SMO as the only way to avoid a gay parade in Donetsk, or not to be killed for speaking Russian, does not exhaust the “Orthodox” apology for this operation. The key point is the non-recognition of the ethno-cultural identity of Ukrainians and, accordingly, Ukrainian statehood. Hence, slogans like “One nation; one country; Little Russia/New Russia; Holy Russia”.
In recent decades, this ideology was developed by fringe Orthodox groups such as the “Union of Orthodox Citizens” or the “Association of Orthodox Experts” (AOE), which were not taken seriously not only by the country’s political leadership, but also by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, AOE leader Kirill Frolov headed the Ukraine Department at the Institute of CIS Countries and wrote a manifesto for the destruction of Ukraine as “anti-Russia.”
Today, Frolov complains that the ROC hierarchs have taken a passive and wait-and-see stance regarding the SMO — “only the patriarch, Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) and Archbishop Syktyvkar Pytyrim (Volochkov) have made it clear that they agree to share responsibility with Putin.”
The turning point in history that we are experiencing has opened the minds of many in the Russian Orthodox Church. Both supporters and opponents of the “demilitarization” of Ukraine went through their moral “reincarnations.” The Ukrainian hierarch most loyal to Moscow in the past – Metropolitan Serhiy (Gensytskyi) of Ternopil officially returned to Putin the Order of Friendship received from him 10 years ago.
Protodeacon Andriy Kurayev, not a great admirer of Ukrainian culture and religiosity, took a consistent position, calling for peace. On the contrary, his former teacher at the Moscow Theological Schools, Professor Oleksiy Osypov, fully approved of the SMO, equating peace-making calls to “Tolstoism”. But a real storm across social networks was caused by the sermon of the “sweet-voiced Moscow father” Artemiy Volodymyrov, a star of Orthodox TV channels, who was not previously spotted for militant rhetoric. He called not only to pursue the SMO until the end, but also to think about the “terrible future” of the Baltics, saying that all today’s independent countries that were once part of the Russian Empire will eventually join Russia.
The leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the ultra-Orthodox fringe clerics, were able to convince the Kremlin over the past eight years that “canonical Orthodoxy” in Ukraine is that which is in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate, and it is about the need to protect it that Putin howled before unleashing the war They said it provides for a reliable backing, that it is being hunted down and crushed by the “Banderite junta,” and that they will meet the “liberators” with church bell rings. In fact, everything turned out to be completely different. And now, if it comes to “debriefings,” the ideologues of Holy Russia and the “revival of Little Russia” will receive, safe to say, a severe penalty from the military and political leadership of the Russian Federation, whom they appear to have misled.
Source: Theologian Mamuka Putkaradze
