UOC MP priest Gennady Shkil, who is currently serving in the temporarily occupied part of Kherson region, stated on his Telegram channel that the burial site of the victims of Russian mass repression in Izium is an ordinary cemetery. Meanwhile, the UOC-MP leadership has again ignored these statements.
“As I understand that the Ukrainian psyop center decided to simply dig up the cemetery, thereby making a mockery of the bodies of the dead?” Shkil writes. He added to his posting a reference to Russian “Operation Z” propagandists, who claim torture claims are a “hoax.”
The UOC-MP cleric also denies the crimes of the Ruscists, who first tortured people to death in Izium, and then buried them. Instead, the “priest” says that the graves in Izium allegedly had all the signs of a regular Christian burial.
“There was a body of a woman buried in a coffin, she had a cross in her hands, a prayer of passage, a handkerchief and a wreath on her head, etc. That is, from the point of view of an Orthodox priest, the woman was buried according to all the rules of Orthodox rites. This doesn’t look like the burials in Babyn Yar, Bykivna, and other places of burials of mass repression victims,” Shkil claimed outrageously.
As we can see, the priest of the so-called “Ukrainian” Church not only covers up the crimes of the Ruscists, failing to admit that the people had been tortured to death, but even shifts the blame to the Ukrainian side, which discovers and documents these Russian crimes against the civilian population. The cleric says that the exhumation of the bodies is a “mockery.”
Russian crimes against civilians in Izium
It is worth noting that as of the evening of Monday, September 19, National Police experts have already exhumed 146 bodies of victims of Russian aggression. According to Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional military administration, most of the exhumed bodies are those of civilians, including two children. Some of the bodies have signs of a violent death, there are those with their hands tied and other traces of torture. The deceased were also found to have mine-explosive injuries, shrapnel and stab wounds.
The temporary occupation of Izium lasted from March 7 to September 10, 2022. For five months, the armed forces of the Russian Federation carried out massive shelling of the city and its suburbs, employing various types of weapons, killing and torturing local residents.
According to law enforcement, 11 torture chambers have already been discovered in the territories liberated from the Russians in Kharkiv region, including six in the town of Izium.
In Kharkiv region, since September 6, about 8,500 square kilometers of territory, about 388 settlements, and about 150,000 people have been liberated from the Russian invaders.
This is not the first time that UOC-MP priest Gennady Shkil has promoted Russian narratives
It is worth noting that he is now based in the Russian-captured Hola Prystan, Kherson region. As soon as the Armed Forces of Ukraine de-occupies these settlements, this “Ukrainian” collaborator of the UOC-MP will most likely flee along with the other occupiers, as did the Metropolitan Yelisey (Ivanov) of Izium. The latter fled to Russia’s Belgorod region in the face of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Previously, Shkil welcomed the Russian invaders in occupied Kherson on “Victory Day”. The UOC priest also praised the occupiers for their “liberation from the West.” He spoke in Moscow, where he told how “life is normalizing” now that the invaders are there, and spoke of “fraternal nations”.
He is one of those clergymen of the UOC-MP who support Russia’s war on the occupied part of Kherson region. In the program released on the Akaphist YouTube channel in August of this year, Shkil calls Russia’s war against Ukraine a “special operation” and blames everything on the Ukrainian government, which he calls “Nazi.”
Gennady Shkil mourned collaborator Savluchenko‘s death after local guerillas killed him.
In May, Shkil accused the Armed Forces of shelling civilians. Shkil recently spread Kremlin propaganda about Ukrainian defenders on his Telegram channel. He published a video produced by Russian propagandists claiming the alleged shelling of the residential building by the Ukrainian Army. Shkil cynically captioned the video: “The Armed Forces of Ukraine love the people of Kherson.”
Viktor Trehubov, a Ukrainian Army Captain, a psyop expert, who in peaceful life was a well-known journalist, blogger, and one of the leaders of the Demsokyra movement, asked the leadership of the UOC-MP why they still hadn’t expelled the collaborator priest Gennady Shkil.
In fact, the UOC-MP did not punish any of their bishop who collaborated with the Ruscists.
