Category Archives: Orthodoxy

Global or Globalist and the Russian State or the Russian Church

Global or Globalist

It is a cliché to state that we live in a Global world. It is nothing new. The concept was inherent in the term ‘World Wars’, the first of which began 110 years ago. On the other hand, the vision of an interconnected world where all the different nations live together and co-operate in peace, respecting each other’s differences, is profoundly Christian, as in the Seven ‘Universal’ (that is, Global) Councils. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. However, being Global is not at all the same as being Globalist.

Unlike Global, Globalism means forcing everyone to be the same, preparing the planet for a One World Government under a Dictator, known as Antichrist. The Globalist mafia, with its alphabet soup of US, EU, UK, NATO, UN, IMF, AUKUS, WEF etc, with its Davos serfs of banksters, arms-dealers, police states, spies, Soros, Schwab, Biden, Macron, Starmer (or Sunak), Scholz etc, is a curse, as it is preparing the way for Antichrist. We resist that mafia. We chase out the Globalist elites, for otherwise we shall see our countries and our families die.

Yet, Globalism is here. Who owns the Western half of Europe, that is, Peninsular Europe? The US Globalist elite, a giant with feet of clay, supported by its Globalist client elite in the Western half of Europe, owns those countries. This is why the fall of that half of Europe, of the European Union and the rest, will be like that of the Soviet Union, overnight, like a ripe, red apple that hangs from a tree and then, without any prompting, suddenly falls. Why? Because, eaten by worms, it has rotted from inside. It is ready to fall.

The fall of the West has come through the Ukraine. We speak of the small-scale, with fewer than 100,000 troops, highly-provoked (Russian-speaking Ukrainians had for eight years been genocided by the US-installed, Neo-Nazi Kiev regime and were about to be massacred by Kiev troops) invasion, or rather liberation, of the Eastern Ukraine by Russian forces. To the astonishment of the Russians, the West forbade the Kiev regime to make peace and armed the Kiev regime to the teeth with NATO arms, declaring that it wanted all Ukrainians to die. So Russia turned to Plan B, to wage a war of attrition until the apple falls.

Thus, the West has chosen to commit suicide, defeated militarily by superior Russian arms and politically and economically by Russian-inspired BRICS. Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and perhaps other peoples in the Carpathians and the Balkans of South-Eastern Europe, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and others, if they can free themselves of the US elite’s puppets, will also join BRICS. This will be their salvation. Little wonder that Victor Orban of Hungary has recently hosted the Chinese leader in Budapest and been hosted by him in Beijing. The rest of Western Europe, in the North-East, the North-West and the South-West, will be left aside, until it repents for arming Kiev regime troops and mercenaries and also joins BRICS.

The Russian State and the Russian Church

The conflict in the Ukraine, also as a new country, soon to join BRICS, will be a victory for the Russian State, although not for the Russian Church. The latter has compromised itself everywhere outside the Russian Federation. There senior figures in its administration have persecuted and betrayed lifelong Russian Orthodox faithful, starting in England and then in the Ukraine, then in the Baltics and Moldova, and not least inside the Russian Federation itself.

The recent events in Hungary witness to the tragic decadence that has penetrated the episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church over the last 30 years. It is not a question of one very disreputable and apparently criminal witness and his mother (why was a pervert befriended?), it is the witnesses of audio and video recordings. Nobody who knows anything about the fatal love of luxury of the episcopate of the Russian Church over the last 30 years is in the least surprised. It all just confirms a multitude of witness reports over the last 20 years in particular.

The activities of many senior figures are anti-Russian, shaming the patriotic President Putin and our good friend, Sergei, among his ministers. The recent revelations typify many others. This leaves the episcopate of the Russian Church, both inside and outside the former USSR, to be cleansed by the Russian State. Make no mistake, this will happen. However, the schismatic, money-corrupted, liberal and homosexual (usually the same ones) among the episcopate are not only anti-patriotic, but also, and above all, they are anti-Orthodox.

For Orthodox Christianity does not accept the word ‘exceptional’ or ‘indispensable’. All Local Churches act together in conciliarity and catholicity. No single Local Church, however old, however big, however powerful or however rich, has the right to lord it over the others because it is ‘exceptional’. That error is precisely Globalism, the error of ‘Roman Catholicism’.

Some may admire that; we faithful Orthodox clergy and people do not, for we are not Globalists, since that is a sin against the Catholicity of the Church. Yes, the Great Cleansing of the Orthodox episcopate, Russian Orthodox and other, is coming. The guilty bishops must be trembling. If not, they have a shock coming.

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’). The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians. It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

After the overthrow of the Tsar by traitors in the so-called ‘Revolution’ of 1917, and the ensuing substitution of the Russian Empire for the Soviet Union, parts of the Russian Orthodox Church broke away from it. Although divisions of tiny, temporary ‘catacomb’ church communities formed inside the USSR, divisions were nowhere so obvious as outside the USSR, where there was the political freedom to choose which part of the Church to belong to.

The anti-Soviet Russian emigration split into two warring groups, one quite independent of the rest of the Orthodox Church, the other under the British-controlled and, after British bankruptcy from 1948 on the US-controlled, Patriarchate of Constantinople (1). In any case, both groups were independent of the vast majority of the Russian Church, which was under the enslaved and enhostaged administration of the 99% of the Church inside the Soviet Union. Why did these divisions develop?

The Moscow Patriarchate: Bride of Christ or Concubine of the State?

Like all other Churches the Russian Orthodox Church has had a long history of both dependence on and independence from the State. In this respect, people may think of the independence from the State of St Nil of Sora (1508) and the Transvolgan Non-Possessors (1), of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow (murdered in 1569 on the orders of the centralising Tsar Ivan IV) and of the Old Ritualist schism of the 1660s, which was largely created by reaction to the persecution of the centralising State, which demanded absurd ritual conformity. By 1917 some 10% of the Russian population were declaring that they were Old Ritualists, thus showing the strength of opposition to the centralist State. All the above showed independence from the nationalist State, and many showed faithfulness to Orthodox Tradition, placing the Holy Spirit above corruption.

Under the imperialist Emperor Peter I (‘the Great’) (+ 1725), the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was abolished and replaced by a Protestant-style Minister of Religion. Soon after this there began the persecution of monastic life, when some two-thirds of monasteries were closed by the German Empress Catherine I (‘the Great’) (+ 1796). Nevertheless, the Church continued to live, under the great St Paisius (Velichkovsky), forced into exile in Romania, and in the Russian Lands, in Sarov and Optina, where new saints appeared, and in Kronstadt, where there began the eucharistic revival, and elsewhere. The grace of the Holy Spirit was active and the deadly bureaucrats of the State apparatus did not manage to quench it, despite their best efforts. They were opposed by Tsar Nicholas II, who, despised and mocked by the bureaucrats in cassocks, had such great saints as Seraphim of Sarov canonised.

However, during this Imperial period most Russian Orthodox omitted to take communion more than once a year and lead an active life of prayer and fasting. Church life became largely an empty ritual, an exercise in ritualism. Here is why the Soviet atheists (most of them, like Stalin, were also ritually Orthodox) came to power: there was no Orthodox conscience and so spiritual resistance to the myths and practices of atheism. Under the Soviet regime, which unsurprisingly admired the imperialist Peter I as their centralising model, the Church was run by the Secret Police. Therefore, the enslaved Church hierarchy of the time adopted a subservient pro-State policy called ‘Sergianism’, in order to ensure its survival. Sergianism was massively rejected by the politically free emigration: hence the divisions. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, ordinary bishops, priests, monastics and faithful people were martyred in their hundreds of thousands.

The remnants of these State-subservient attitudes are still very present in the Russian Church today. For instance, churches in towns and cities usually have professional choirs (if parishioners want to sing, they are forbidden, as in the Russian church in Chiswick, a suburb of London, for example), which reduces the church to a ritualist theatre with a choir to listen to. For example, many ordinary Orthodox in Russia today reproach the Church which appears to be run like a business, the main interest seeming to be profit. Also the centralised hierarchy in Moscow actively opposes clergy who have dissident political opinions from the State about the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. This only creates more scandals.

This centralisation has led to those parts of the Church in independent countries outside the Russian Federation wanting to break away from the centralised control of Moscow. This is for national reasons, for example, there is resistance to the Moscow centralisation on the part of Non-Russians in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere. They all seek Church independence and devolution. However, there are also cases of sectarian and schismatic groups which break away from central authority for purely political, right-wing reasons, both inside the Russian Federation, but also outside it, above all in the highly Americanised ROCOR (see below).

ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

In 2007 we all at last managed to get the New York-based ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) to rejoin the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. Otherwise, it would have become a schismatic sect, out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. When it reunited with Moscow, it lost some 5% of its 300 parishes. These 5% were extremists who really wanted to be in schism, out of communion with everyone, claiming like pharisees to be ‘True Russian Orthodox Churches’. There were then, and perhaps still are, about four of these tiny squabbling sects, formed in 2007, all cursing each other.

After the wonderful God-sent opportunity of reunion with the bulk of the reviving Russian Orthodox Church and life-giving canonical communion with it for a decade between 2007 and 2017, very sadly, the ROCOR authorities gradually lapsed back into their sectarian temptations from before 2007. Step by step these sectarians took control of ROCOR’s New York Synod in an internal coup d’etat, effectively isolating its ill but charismatic Metropolitan, rejecting all his decisions and using his electronic signature to justify their very strange and deeply uncanonical decisions.

Very sadly, the extremists had learned nothing from being in communion with the Mother-Church for ten years. They had simply camouflaged and justified their pharisaical, schismatic and sectarian tendencies behind their alleged unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. Today ROCOR is out of full communion with Moscow, and so its second state is worse than its first. Instead of Orthodoxy, it has espoused the sectarian American right-wingery of woman-despising ‘Orthobros’ and Trumpism, totally confusing Divine Orthodoxy with mere human conservatism and its lust for money and power.

This pharisaical state of schism and fanatical sectarianism was encouraged by deluded Non-Russian neophytes, who want to be more royalist than the King, more Russian Orthodox than real Russian Orthodox. In reality, these Lutheran and Calvinist sectarians have ended up outside full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, the King they betrayed. They have painted themselves into their own corner, apparently feeling very comfortable in their isolation. Thus, they have renounced their own saints, who were internationally-minded, not isolated, and concelebrated with and gathered together all Orthodox. These include St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, whom the US right-wingers so cruelly suspended and persecuted, leading to his premature death in 1966.

Some suspect that the new ROCOR division has been encouraged by the CIA, of whose largesse ROCOR was a well-known recipient for a generation between 1966 and 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. As participants in the San Francisco ROCOR Council in 2006 we all know that the CIA virulently opposed the ROCOR reunion with Moscow in 2007 and from 2017 on tried to censor and then close this anti-CIA (and anti-FSB and anti-MI5) Orthodox England site through an amateur agent. For a few months he succeeded, causing an international scandal and making ROCOR a laughing-stock among the other Local Churches. Perhaps money exchanged hands here too.

Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

The second part of the Russian emigration which split away from the enslaved Church authorities in Soviet Moscow was the group founded by Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals and centred in Paris. (Some of them spoke better French than Russian; all spoke fluent French). Originally less than a third of the size of the now US-centred ROCOR, today it is called the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition. In reality it is very small outside France, as it is practically forbidden to expand elsewhere, and now has only some sixty parishes.

In 2019 it too at last rejoined the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, leaving behind in Constantinople, to our open relief, its masonic and modernist wing with its uncanonical practices, losing not 5% of its parishes, clergy and people, as with ROCOR, but over 40% of its parishes, clergy and people. If ROCOR had lost 40% of its body, then it would have remained in full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate after 2017. Too much of the pharisaical, ‘onetruechurchist’, sectarian and schismatic had remained in ROCOR, thus poisoning its potential. Conversely, the much smaller Paris Archdiocese not only remained in communion, but also, to its credit and unlike ROCOR, remained politically free of Moscow centralisation.

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

In the history of the last generation of pre-Revolutionary Russia under the last Emperor, it is clear that right-wing extremists played as negative a role as left-wing extremists. For example, plotting together, they murdered the Tsar’s adviser, Gregory Rasputin, who was helping him bring the Old Ritualists back into the Church. But this treacherous extremism can above all be seen in the ensuing history of the tragic Civil War between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. Then both sides committed awful atrocities, as described in any history of that dreadful war, where brother killed brother.

Sadly, just like the Reds, most of the Whites did not support the Tsar: it is reckoned that only 10% of them did so. They were the only real Whites. Most simply wanted their land, property and wealth back from the Marxists. Many ‘Whites’ were quite as openly atheistic as the Reds. As a Russian patriot and real Orthodox, the Sovereign Tsar stood above both Reds and Whites, above and outside the vulgar extremes of both left and right, above and outside their centralisation and nationalism. This is his Testament. This is our heritage. Under him there would have been no tragic war between Russian and American-proxy Ukrainians today.

Notes:

https://orthodoxwiki.org/Maximus_V_of_Constantinople
It is interesting that the enemies of the Non-Possessors accused them of stealing money! Nothing has changed. We know of a very greedy bishop in England today who accused a Non-Possessor priest, who subsidised his parish from his own money, of exactly the same thing! Of course, the bishop never apologised.

A universal God has been declared! An examination for Orthodoxy

https://spzh.live/en/chelovek-i-cerkovy/80170-a-universal-god-has-been-declared-an-examination-for-orthodoxy

12 May 04:19

1473

A sermon on Anti-Pascha Sunday.

The time of trials is given to us to understand who we are. And not only we but also those who lead, guide and teach us how to live. This applies primarily to the Church because God will judge those on the outside (1 Corinthians 5:13).

As a priest I have experienced in my life the entire period of the recent history of the Church, starting from its revival in the territory of the former USSR and ending with what we have now. But now all Local Churches are undergoing examination, including those whom no upheavals have particularly touched until this time. The spirit of the new “wonderful” world, which is gradually beginning to enter its earthly possessions, offers each of them two options: to serve it or to be gradually destroyed.

The words of Christ that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” apply to the entire Church rather than its individual local branches. Where is the Church of St Genevieve, St Patrick of Armagh or St David of Menevia now?

Just a few decades ago, we had an unprecedented Orthodox boom. Huge editions of patristic books were published. And when the Internet entered society, hundreds of preachers began to teach people around the clock what an Orthodox Christian should be like. Teachers of faith of all kinds have been talking about Christ for almost forty years, but only a small part of them could show Him by their own example. After all, speaking and teaching about God is much easier than following Him.

Thus, we have built an Orthodoxy which externally looks fine but the strength of this structure can only be tested by an earthquake.

I remember a time when a hundred and fifty children could be baptised in a church per day. Where are these 30-40-year-old sons and daughters of God now? Are they living a spiritual life? Do they go to church or even know where it is?

The Lord has looked at us for decades and patiently awaited fruits. But now is the time for harvest. How many ascetics have grown in monasteries, righteous people in parish churches, and hierarchs in eparchial administrations during this time? I don’t know, only God knows.

Orthodox exams are taking place all over the world now. Each Local Orthodox Church is taking them. The best, privileged, one might say, position is held by those Orthodox who are openly hunted: those who are outlawed, persecuted in the media, lied against and slandered. Such a Church simply has no way out: nothing is left for it but to be crucified with Christ.

The worst position is occupied by those Local Churches that have turned from the brides of Christ into State concubines. Of course, they did not immediately decide on this adultery. It happened gradually, step by step. At first, it was necessary to make small concessions, and then to descend lower and lower.

All these processes vividly manifested themselves during the coronavirus period when, for the sake of fear, it was allowed to believe that physical death could settle in the Chalice, which is given to us as the source of eternal Life. Therefore, commune with disposable spoons, don’t trust God, trust the WHO. And do not let people go to services, close the churches for Easter and do not celebrate liturgies. And those who did not obey and did not want to violate their priestly oath received hefty fines.

All this was approved by the priesthood, which obediently adapted to the requirements of the state authority. The next step is to recognise the schismatics, then to start blessing non-traditional LGBT marriages, and so on.

There are also those who at the official level have rejected Christ and the Gospel, replacing them with national ideology and military-political doctrine. The clergy who disagree with this are banned or even imprisoned. But can all these bans be seriously considered canonically justified if they come from people who have become servants of Caesar instead of God, essentially betraying their soul to the devil?

And in recent times, among the faithful, a special type has appeared – “couch ascetics of piety”. They destroy all the “enemy filth” day and night with the machine-gun burst of their comments on the Internet. Their religion is anger. They do not understand that the only thing a person needs in this world is to learn to love the Lord and all people with all their soul.

All we need is to immerse our spirit in God and remain in Him forever. Neither in politics, nor in war, nor in Internet news, but in God. But only a few are capable of hearing this.

Judgment is approaching. Weeds have grown and multiplied all over the Earth. In the Church of Christ, there are more and more propagandists, political officers and simply opportunists. what do they direct the zeal of their flock? To hate sinners! That’s their main goal. The essence of their faith is war with global evil. But they do not see stubbornly that they are this very evil.

The Gospel calls us to be clothed in Christ, to become a renewed person. “No, this is not true,” teach modern preachers, you should kill other people “for the sake of Christ” – this is what we bless and inspire you to do. And yet the first Christians also lived in very difficult times. But for some reason, they did not care at all about the political situation of their empire; nor did they worry about either external or internal enemies.

They were worried only about one thing – whether their name was written in the Book of Life or not.

Nine Canons For Modern Times

In the last times the followers of Antichrist will go to church, get baptised and preach the Gospel commandments. But do not believe those who have no good deeds. You can only know a real Christian by his works. True faith is in the heart, and not in the reason. He who has faith in his reason will follow Antichrist and he who has faith in his heart will perceive who he is.

St Gabriel (Urgebadze)

Canon I

Any bishop has the right to impose a schism with another canonical Orthodox Church or any Diocese of it, forbidding his clergy to concelebrate with it and excommunicating all their clergy and people, even though his own clergy and people have close relatives or lifelong friends in that Church or Diocese. This schism may be imposed for ideological or for racial reasons and this is quite acceptable. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon II

Any bishop has the right to depose clergy who refuse to hand over to him large amounts of money or property, so that he can live a luxurious lifestyle. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon III

Any bishop has the right to abduct his head bishop, whether Patriarch, Metropolitan or Archbishop, in order to ensure that he can then do whatever he wants. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking

Canon IV (The Geneva Canon)

Any bishop has the right to depose another bishop whom he dislikes in order to ensure that he can then do whatever he or his protege want in the place of the deposed bishop. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon V

Any bishop has the right to depose any clergyman who disagrees with his personal political opinions, in order to ensure that he can preach whatever he wants without opposition. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VI

Any bishop has the right to depose any clergyman who reports to his fellow-bishops that the bishop in question is homosexual. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VII

Any bishop has the right to be jealous of any clergyman who is more successful than him in attracting people to the church. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VIII

Any bishop has the right to forge the signature of his head bishop, whether Patriarch, Metropolitan or Archbishop, electronically, in order to ensure that he can do whatever he wants. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon IX

Always remember the main principle: Hate your neighbour as much as you hate yourself.

The Orthodox World: The Third Way Holds the Centre Ground

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Introduction: Secularist Greeks Versus Secularist Russians

So wrote the Irish poet Yeats in 1919 after the first catastrophic tribal European War of 1914-1918 was over. Since that time over a hundred years of ‘mere anarchy’ and ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ have been loosed. Still today some wonder how much longer ‘the rough beast’ will take to ‘slouch to Bethlehem to be born’, as Yeats wrote further in his same poem The Second Coming. In the affairs of the Non-Orthodox world, Protestantism seems to have lost all its faith and is now closing down, selling off its churches, as it is ‘lacking all conviction’. As for Papalism, it is led by an old and sick man who faces scandal after scandal and all is ‘falling apart’. What about the situation of the Orthodox Church?

Secularists, who only look at externals and fail to know the inner life of the Church, see Orthodoxy as divided between Russians and Greeks. They always have done so and always will ignore the vast majority of the Local Orthodox Churches. However, inside the Church we have a far different understanding from them, reaching much beyond the superficial nationalist politics of Greek and Russian elites. What amateur CIA writers call ‘The Clash of Patriarchs’ (1) is nonsense. The Church is not about personalities, politics or ethnicities, it is far deeper and broader than mere skin-deep secular racial identities, Russian, Greek or any other, for in Christ there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek’. Outside the Church there is only that.

The Centre Ground

Our place is in the centre ground of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, which is also the ground held by churched Russians and Greeks, though not by Russian and Greek nationalists, who are merely ‘cultural Orthodox’, nostalgic and delusional for long since disappeared empires. The Centre is opposed to the divisive nationalism of unchurched Greeks and Russians. That nationalism is rejected by Non-Greeks and Russians, that is, by the majorities of the other fourteen Local Churches, which form ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’, covering Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania and Moldova, with Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria standing ready nearby.

The Hellenism of the Greek world, which ended in 1453, is rejected by Non-Greeks. In the second largest Local Church, the Romanian, we ignore both Greeks and Russians. In Western Europe we are far larger, soon with twelve bishops, nearly a thousand parishes and five million faithful. At present the Romanian Church is also reclaiming Romanian Orthodox in the southern Ukraine, Moldova and Western Europe from both Greeks and Russians. Serbs, Macedonians, Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Romanians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Syrians, Poles and Albanians also reject Greek interference. And Russian nationalism is becoming irrelevant even in the former USSR as Orthodox assimilate, as we can see below.

The Tragedy of Russian Politicisation

It seems strange that Orthodox in countries as diverse as the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia and Kazakhstan are still formally under the Russian Church. Already in Estonia for thirty years and for a few months in Lithuania, the Russian Church has had no monopoly of jurisdiction. As for the Ukraine, the Church jurisdictional situation there is chaotic, with Moscow losing everything. though not yet as chaotic as among Orthodox in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia, where many Local Churches are represented and people are free to choose their church. And governments there are also free to allow any Local Church to operate on its territory – or not, with the Russian Church already banned in Latvia.

The sad fact is that Russian Church life has been highly politicised; much is ideology, rigidity, negativity and coldness. The old Russian emigration anecdote goes that once a Russian was discovered by a ship living on a desert island, where he had built three churches. When asked by the captain of the ship that rescued him why he had built three churches, he replied: ‘So that there are two where I must not go’. The fact is that the Russian emigration has been marked by hatred, not love, by bishops who hate their clergy and people, ‘drowning the ceremony of innocence’, who try to steal the people’s churches, sadistically punish and generally have no idea of how to be pastors and love their clergy and people (2).

The Ukraine

What of the Ukraine? What will happen there after the forthcoming Russian victory? Probably, this will at long last create a real Ukraine, divested of its very large minorities, almost a majority, over half of the old Soviet-created Ukraine. The far south-west corner, former Habsburg territory, will surely return to Hungary after its theft in 1945. In the south, North Bukovina, which was also stolen by Stalin, will return to Romania. And surely at least two of the mainly Uniat provinces in the far west may return to Poland. The rest, the real Ukraine, minus the huge Novorossija in the south and east which is largely Russian, will remain as the real Ukraine, with its centre in historic Kiev and be Ukrainian-speaking.

Clearly, the time will then be up for the so-called ‘OCU’, Constantinople’s fake Church, that absurd State-run jurisdiction of gangsters and homosexuals with 1,500 now empty churches, stolen by State-aided violence from the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, led by the heroic Metr Onufry of Kiev. On the other hand, after military victory, Moscow, which is now at the head of a Russian National Church, will have to win the peace. It will be obliged to decentralise and at last grant the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly (33 years late…). No Ukrainian wants to attend ‘alien’, Russian-controlled, churches. Ukrainians want their own Church. This will be the seventeenth Local Orthodox Church.

Moldova

Then there is Moldova. The main Church there, which depends on Metropolitan Vladimir who is under Moscow for the moment, will soon have twelve bishops. It works in competition with the smaller Metropolia of Bessarabia, which also claims historic jurisdiction in Moldova and is part of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Vladimir has recently made a tour of the very large Moldovan Diaspora. It is possible that with so many bishops he may after the fall of the US-run Ukraine want to declare autocephaly (independence) from Moscow, with the full backing of the Moldovan government and the US ambassador (which is much the same thing). However, such a move will have complex implications.

For Moscow would not recognise such a self-declared autocephaly. At that point Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova should logically, if he wished, negotiate with the Romanian Church to have his autocephaly confirmed by it. This would be on condition that he create unity with the Bessarabian Metropolia and withdrew all the absurd ‘defrockings’ of clergy who have already transferred from him to it, both inside and outside Moldova. Only if the Romanian Church granted him autocephaly, would the rest of the Orthodox world recognise it, leaving Moscow even more isolated and lacking a part of its former Diaspora in Western Europe. A Moldovan Church would be the eighteenth Local Church.

The Baltics and Beyond

Beyond this, Moscow would also have to deal with Church affairs in the three independent Baltic republics. If it does not give them autocephaly, they will be further racked by schism and destroyed and undermined by their Russophobic State authorities. Moscow’s long refusal to grant autocephaly has already led to divisions in Estonia and Lithuania. However, since the total number of bishops in the three countries is, I believe, only eight, and numbers of the faithful are fewer than half a million, it would make sense to set up a Baltic Orthodox Church, covering all three territories. Indeed, it could be argued that Finland should become a fourth part of this Baltic Orthodox Church. This would be the nineteenth Local Church.

Beyond this there is the Russian Church in the Diaspora. Here there is schism in Western Europe because of the schism of the very aggressive American Synod of Russian bishops, with its ghetto churches in backrooms and garden sheds, with a dozen or so ‘onetrue church’ converts in each one and clergy who have no theological training or qualifications, ‘making it up as they go along’. They have no idea of mass Orthodoxy. The people and priests turn away from homosexual, bisexual and schismatic psychopathic bishop-pharisees, shouting in jealousy, threatening, intimidating, punishing, trying to steal property and screaming: ‘Give me the keys!’ Their refusal to co-operate with other Orthodox is based on their ideological and racial hatred.

Africa

The Russian Church has Exarchates in Belarus (see below), and two missionary exarchates, in South-East Asia and in Africa. This latter is highly controversial, as the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt has for nearly a century claimed Africa as its territory, though until the late 1920s it had claimed only Egypt and Libya. Although here it has made several hundred thousand Black African converts, its missions have been weak and control of the Church is 100% in Greek hands and Greek embassies. The Russian mission appears to have opened in revenge for the 2018 Greek setting up a ‘Church’ with US finance in the Ukraine, Russia’s canonical territory. Does the Russian missionary Exarchate in Africa have a future then?

On paper the Russian Exarchate appears to be as uncanonical as the Greek ‘Church’ in the Ukraine. However, in the Ukraine the people do not attend the top-down Greek Church, which recently adopted the ‘new’ calendar against all tradition and many of whose clergy are not even ordained. On the other hand, the Russian mission has attracted grassroots interest, with over 100 African priests and their communities joining it. Collective baptisms are taking place. If the Russian mission goes native and has black African bishops, then it will have a future. But first it has to prove that it is not a political, Russian embassy set-up. Only if it goes native, will it get canonical recognition as a fait accompli and become the twentieth Local Church.

Conclusion: The Revelation Is At Hand

There are other former Soviet, but now independent republics, such as Belarus and the five stans of Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan, where there are several million Russians. At present none of these countries has asked for its own autocephalous Church, but that time will almost certainly come. As for the Moscow Diaspora in Western Europe and the Americas, it has largely become a ghetto, as the Russian Church is seen as politically compromised and has painted itself into a nationalist corner. However, the Greek Diaspora is also politically compromised, it is largely elderly, to the point of dying out, and its episcopate suffers from severe homosexualisation, with all the usual accompanying financial and moral scandals.

The Russian Church is already facing financial difficulties inside Russia. Fewer and fewer are attending churches there, as they appear to be subordinate to politics and not to the Gospels and spirituality, which the people seek. In that respect it is like the Protestant Church of England, which is also seen as hopelessly in political thrall to the State. In general, the age when the Church can be held hostage to Greek and Russian nationalism is over. The vital forces of the Church are elsewhere. The Orthodox world is not Greeks and Russians – they are only two of the already sixteen Local Churches, perhaps to become twenty. The others, what we have called ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’, provide the Third Way. This means that the Centre can hold.

Notes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-ukraine-orthodox-christian-church-bartholomew-kirill/677837/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-am&utm_term=The
See the portrait of the dried-up pharisee-monk Fr Ferapont, full of hatred and jealousy for the saintly Elder Zosima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, or the portrait of the very unpleasant émigré bishop in the 1957 novel Father Vikenty by Paul Chavchavadze. We know who the model for that crust-dry bishop was, obviously a repressed homosexual or pedophile.

The Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in Europe and Russia

Foreword: European Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy

On my almost daily travels through Suffolk, I regularly see flying in gardens the Suffolk flag, the golden crown crossed by the two arrows of St Edmund on a blue background. It refers to the martyrdom by arrows of St Edmund, the last King of East Anglia, in the Year 869. This was part of European Orthodoxy, the England which was defending itself against paganism because it was in communion with, and part of, the Orthodox Christian world. This is just the opposite of today, when England has gradually returned to paganism because it has for nearly a millennium been out of communion with, and not part of, the Church.

In writing these words about the love for St Edmund, I am reminded how just over 14 years ago I sat with our own Suffolk Count and Countess Benckendorff in that oasis of culture, the Munnings Museum in Dedham, Essex. Then we discussed my recent visit to our Russian Orthodox ‘catacomb’ community in Old York and next fell to discussing the poetry of Masefield, a great friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, which we compared to that of Hoelderlin, de Vigny and Tyutchev. This is Russian Orthodoxy, not brash and alien, modern American or European anti-culture, which Sir Alfred used to mock. After that conversation the Benckendorffs returned to Church life, reassured that the Church at least locally survives.

On 5 April this year we and the Benckendorffs met again, at the Cock Inn in Polstead. This time we discussed a recent visit to our mutual friend, Baroness Olga Tiesenhausen, in Surrey, to whom I gave confession and communion. The daughter of a White Russian noble, turned seamstress in exile in Paris, she loved the old parish in Meudon outside Paris, where she grew up, and our then rector, Fr Alexander Trubnikov, who was one of us who love the Tradition and therefore hate extremism of both sorts. She had recently been made very unwelcome in both Russian churches in London; the one a political extension of the post-Soviet embassy; the other under the control of pathological crazies, fanatical and culture-less converts who hate all who are not schism and sect like themselves. Tragically, through their schism they missed the great opportunity to become a canonical, but also politically free and multinational part of the Russian Church, working with others in Catholicity. They have zero understanding of the real Russian Orthodox Tradition and Russian Orthodox culture.

They ‘defrock’ conscientious and principled Orthodox pastors of integrity and of the Tradition. This imaginary punishment, as it comes from schismatics, is worn by them as a badge of honour and makes them even more popular among ordinary Orthodox and proves that they are not unprincipled bureaucrat-clerics and careerists. It is all so different from the beloved real Russian Church and its European culture in which we were all brought up, like our parishioners in Old York too. With the Benckendorffs we fell to discussing the post-Soviet nightmare, which began in 1991 and continues today. We concluded that the solution can only be in the coming Tsar and the complete cleansing of Church and State of the pre-Soviet diseases of bureaucracy and corruption (as portrayed for example by Gogol), of the Soviet diseases of centralisation and persecution (as portrayed for example in the late Soviet film The Irony of Fate), and the post-Soviet diseases of (US-imposed) militarisation and nationalism.

Introduction: The Restoration of Russian Orthodox Culture

Just before the 1917 palace revolt in Russia, falsely known as the ‘Revolution’, British spies murdered Gregory Rasputin. It was the ‘first shot of the Revolution’. His name means ‘the parting of the ways’, whereas the name ‘Putin’ means ‘the way’. His way is not the way we want to take, but we believe that it will, by the paradox of Divine Providence, lead to where we need to be. This is a quite different place from now. We have far greater aims than post-Soviet deviations. These include the cleansing of the fringes of the post-Soviet Russian Church from American schism and hate-filled sectarianism, and of the post-Soviet Russian Church itself from politicking, financial corruption, careerism, moral decadence and the extremism bred by them.

Together with all our dear friends in the Patriarchate of Romania, gathered over the last three decades and who have welcomed us as refugees from the vicious persecution by Russian schismatics and hysterical converts, as well as with our dear friends all over Europe, in Russia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, the Baltics, Belarus, Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Czechia, in the cleansed St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris and our friends in the churches in Geneva and Baden-Baden, we will see the Russian Church restored to what Tsar Nicholas II wanted it to be. That is what the whole mainstream Orthodox world also needs it to be. The Orthodox world has been patiently awaiting this restoration for generations. The now very isolated Local Church of Russia has not yet taken up in the spirit of Catholicity the place waiting for it in the concert of the sixteen Local Churches, of which it is only one, albeit by far the largest in number. Only together can they be the voice of God.

Instead, it isolated itself by its refusal to turn the other cheek when uncanonically attacked by US-financed and homosexualised Constantinople in the Ukraine. Then it imposed on itself the further isolation of cutting of communion, followed by uncanonical revenge in Africa, and nationalistic and militaristic politics. The martyred Tsar’s vision of the restored, pre-Imperial Church, like the church of the Fyodorovsky Icon which he built in Tsarskoe Selo and which was restored over a decade ago, is also ours. It is like our church, also free of the decadence that began with Peter I, free of its decadent iconography and Italianate opera singing, its theatrical ritualism, bureaucratic clericalism, anti-pastoral, Statist rigidity, money-grubbing and love of luxury, nationalistic and militaristic phariseeism, hatred for others, and practice of rare communion – at best once a year.

The whole Orthodox world, not least here in Western Europe, awaits a restored, post-post-Soviet, broad and benevolent Russian Church, a Church of European culture, not of convert fanaticism or of narrow, nationalistic and militaristic post-Soviet politics, without sympathy for others and without mission. And we are the majority, the mainstream, representing all the free Local Churches, fourteen votes against two. This is the future of European Orthodox culture, though not of modern Europe. Modern Europe, for all of us heirs to Tsar Nicholas II, is like someone intent on committing suicide, both economic and moral, by hating Russia. Russia is poised to become the fourth largest economy in the world, overtaking Japan. (Russia has already overtaken Germany, indeed the latter is about to be overtaken by Indonesia). Let us look at the example of Great Britain to find the roots of this suicidal bent.

British Establishment Hatred for Imperial Russia

Emperors Paul I (+ 1801) and Nicholas II (+ 1918) of Russia were both removed and then murdered as a result of plots hatched by the British ambassadors in the Saint Petersburg of their times. As John Gleason points out in his 1952 book The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain, systematic and institutionalised British Establishment hatred for Russia began after the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814, which had shocked Britain. This Russophobia was ‘an artificially manufactured product’ of ‘a campaign of a relatively small number of men’ who ‘won acceptance for their views by force of repetition’. In other words, if you repeat the lie often enough, it will stick. It was all about the British elite’s fanatical ambition for world hegemony. No rivals could be allowed.

Thus, the British ruling caste, ‘the Establishment’, engineered wars in which European countries destroyed one another, thus destroying any rivals. It was the same divide and rule policy of the pagan Romans, whom the British elite so admired. Thus, the Victorian Age became that of the purely British Establishment-invented ‘Great Game’, of which the Russians had never heard. In this the British Establishment obsessed itself with its deluded idea that Russia wanted to liberate British-occupied India. This self-delusion led the British Establishment to invade Afghanistan and lose three wars there, to occupy Cyprus (from where it now feeds the Israelis with bombs to genocide Palestine), to help finance the Suez Canal, to arm Japan to the teeth and get it to invade Russia, and then to invade and massacre in Tibet. All unnecessary.

Such British Establishment-orchestrated Russophobia was even reflected in the 1905 children’s book by Edith Nesbit, called The Railway Children. It came as no surprise, for London has long been a centre for plotting and exiled Russian traitors like Herzen, the murderous anarchist Bakunin and then the genocidal and Christ-hating Lenin. Even the evil Trotsky-Bronstein was later sent from arrest to Canada to foment revolution in Russia by the British elite. Today London is again the welcoming centre for anti-Russian oligarchs.

Conversely, the Suffolk Benckendorffs had a relative, Count Paul Benckendorff, who always remained faithful to the Tsar, as he recorded in his book The Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo. As the martyred Tsar’s noble sister, Olga Alexandrovna, who knew Count Paul, somewhat naively wrote: ‘My best friends and so many of my relations are British and I am devoted to them and to much in the English way of life….It has never been possible to discuss with them the utterly vile politics of successive British Parliaments. They were nearly all anti-Russian – and so often without the least cause. So much of British policy is wholly contrary to their own tradition of fair play’ (The Last Grand Duchess, Vorres, P. 240).

British Establishment Hatred for Soviet Russia

Through meddling in Russia in 1916 and 1917, the British elite inadvertently set up the USSR. They had imagined that they would remove the Tsar and then a group of selected oligarchs (that is, British-style aristocrats and ‘liberals’ like the transgender murderer Yusupov – there is nothing new in LGBT) would set up a British-style ‘constitutional’, that is, oligarchic, monarchy. It was clear to anyone outside the West that this would never happen in Russia. So the deluded British indirectly ended up imposing an evil Tsar, called Stalin. And then they sent Hitler to destroy the USSR. Only once again, it all went wrong. Instead of the Nazis destroying the USSR, the USSR defeated the Nazis.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the other horror camps of Western anti-Semitism, despite Churchill who unnecessarily genocided Leipzig civilians as a warning to Soviet troops. Yet they still arrived to liberate Berlin from the Western dictator Hitler, just as they will soon do when they liberate Kiev from the Western dictator Zelensky. The shock of 1945 Berlin was a repeat of 1814, when Russian troops liberated Paris from the Western dictator Napoleon. And so in 1945 Churchill thought up his ‘Operation Unthinkable’, in which the US, Germany and the UK would invade their supposed ‘Ally’, the USSR, and destroy it. Only nobody wanted that, though the Americans did drop nukes and kill 250,000 Japanese civilians as a warning to the USSR and began the ‘Cold War’, proclaimed by Churchill soon after.

After World War II the half-American Churchill reluctantly handed over the tattered remnants of the British Empire to the Americans and the British Empire became the American Empire. However, the latter had no colonies, it was a rogue-state which camouflaged its hypocritical asset-stripping greed behind the excuse of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’. So it brought the debilitating slavery of poverty and the corrupt tyranny of capital to the banana republics it created. Who cares about freedom and democracy, when you have nothing to eat and drink? As in Latin America, Africa, Italy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Gaza.

Even in 1956, when the US abruptly shattered British delusions of empire at Suez, and the British Establishment finally began to admit that it was only a US satellite, the British flattered themselves that they still had ‘a special relationship’ with the US. It is special, like every master and slave relationship. However, such a relationship also infects the master, for he too becomes vain, just as emperors, including those who have no clothes, become vain when they are constantly flattered by yes-men courtiers like the British Cameron and court jesters like the British Johnson. Thus, when the USSR fell because of its economic failure, because, as they said at the time, its Marxist centralised economy could not even supply its women citizens with hygiene products, the US imagined that it had defeated Russia. It is as delusional as the British imagining that they still have an empire.

British Establishment Hatred for the Russian Federation

After 1991, the British took part in the general triumphalist contempt felt by the Western world for Russia, and in the rape of Russian assets, inviting thieving oligarchs to come and live in London. The West failed to understand that Russia had not been defeated. Certainly, in 1991 the Soviet system collapsed, just as in 1917 the Imperial system had collapsed. But a temporary political system is not a country, especially it is not the largest country on earth with its millennial civilisation. The transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Empire and then into the Russian Federation did not persuade the West that the real Russia could survive the failed Western political and economic systems imposed on it.

This age-old Russophobia has been summed up in the recent book of the perceptive Swiss author, Guy Mettan, now translated into English: Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria. When Britain finally began to understand that the West had not defeated Russia in the 1990s, it invented or took part in various sad conspiracies to frame and discredit the new Russia. First, there was Litvinenko, then the Skripals, then MH17, shot down by Ukrainian Nazis, then the plot to destroy the Russian Federation through helping to arm and train the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime in British military camps, the terrorist attack on Nordstream, the deployment of British Special Services to the Black Sea and British PR companies to the propaganda department in Kiev, with their invented ‘Bucha’ narrative myth and such like.

The British Establishment has shown itself to be the most aggressive of all the Western Establishments for absurd propaganda rhetoric during the US proxy war in the Ukraine and in the ‘Cancel Russia’ campaign. It is a fact that even at the height of Nazidom, there was never any ‘Cancel Germany’ campaign. Indeed, the British theme tune for the liberation of Western Europe from the German Nazis consisted of the opening notes of the German Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The British Establishment took a zealous part in applying the 16,500 illegal and backfiring sanctions against Russia in order to destroy it. They failed and made Russia even stronger. It tried to regime-change Putin, quite possibly the most popular leader in Russian history. It failed and made him even more popular. It sent Kiev regime Nazis against the Ukrainian people. It failed and Ukrainians defected to Russia. It decided the only way of winning was through creating terrorist attacks such as that on Crocus City Hall. It failed and made tens of thousands of Russians volunteer to fight against the West in the Ukraine. Today the British MI6 continues to supply Neo-Nazis with weapons in the Ukraine and the Baltics, just as it did throughout the 1950s. In their vain imagination they are working for ‘the Anglosphere’. In fact, the reality is that they are slaves to the Americanosphere.

Russia will not disappear as a reality, whatever the wishful thinking of Hitler or Thatcher, who both equally wanted to reduce Russians to a few millions of people to be herded onto ‘reservations’ for the natives in Siberia, as they openly declared. Millennial Russia will always continue in one form or another, for the moment as the tripartite Union State of East Slav Rus. In the face of the new reality of the rout of its Kiev regime proxies and the cleansing of the Ukraine from Nazi tyrants, the USA will make peace with the Union State. After seeing the US abandoning its failed Ukrainian tool and with NATO and the EU collapsed, the Western European war party, including the British Establishment, if it is not first overthrown by the English, the Scottish and the Welsh who yearn for basic health care, schools, roads and social justice, will be replaced by real leaders. They will be the peace-party, who will make peace with the Union State of Rus, because they look eastwards to the future towards Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and not westwards to the past across a vast and empty ocean.

Conclusion: The End of Western Superiority

The Western war against Russia in the Ukraine is existential for Russia. It is in fact a repeat of the 1962 Turkish missile crisis, (known absurdly in the West as the ‘Cuban’ missile crisis) which the USSR won, when the US was forced to withdraw its missiles from the Turkish-Soviet border. However, this Ukrainian war is not at all existential for Western people, only for the Western ruling class, because it has invested everything in its superiority complex, of which this war is its expression. For the British and the Western Establishment in general, the war is existential because the mere existence and survival of Russia challenges its delusion that it is exceptional, superior and indispensable to all others.

American and Western European elites declare: ‘It is essential that the Ukraine win’. But it is not essential for the peoples of the West or for the peoples of the Ukraine, only for the Western and Ukrainian ruling class, so that they can cling on to their stolen power and stolen money a little longer. Western Europe is certainly not indispensable to Russia, though Russian culture, like Russian gas, is indispensable to Western European peoples. Russian gas can give physical energy back to Europeans. And real Russian culture, which is still largely buried beneath the weight of present post-Soviet Russia, is that of Europe. It is far more European than the modern, Americanised, cultureless Europe of today’s elite. Real Russian culture, once fully revealed, can give spiritual energy back to European people.

After Russia has discredited ‘Western values’ (= orders from the Washington elite), the Western millennium will be over. The time is over, when the American elite arrogantly tells the Central Asians, the British elite tells the Chinese, and the French elite tells the Africans, how to live their lives. Nobody wants to live in the decadence of the modern West. Today the USA has accumulated 34 trillion dollars of debt, which is increasing unsustainably by one trillion dollars every 90 days, 10 trillion dollars every 30 months. It is estimated that it will take 800 years to pay the debt off. Who wants to join bankruptcy? Geopolitical and geostrategic problems and the existence of real European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture are ultimately geotheological. It is all about spiritual values. One day the modern West will understand this. Only by then it may be too late.

In the meantime, we of Orthodox Europe will hold on to our European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture. One day, once all the post-Soviet extremes in the Russian Orthodox Church, both shrill, hysterical and homosexual American convertitis and Soviet careerism, militarism and financial corruption, have gone, Russian Orthodox culture will find its rightful place in the mainstream of the great conciliar symphony of multinational Orthodox culture. This is not a place of domination or of intimidation of the fourteen free Local Churches by politicised Greeks or politicised Russians, but a place of international co-operation and diplomacy, of the Catholicity of the Church, of the Word of God, not of the CIA or of Papal-style personality cults. Then the real Russia will be restored – after over 300 years of erring along the torturous paths of Imperialism, Marxism and post-Sovietism, imposed by Western hatred for Russia and accepted by the anti-patriotic inferiority complex of Russian traitors.

Returning Church Administrations to the Royal and Conciliar Way: A Plea for Catholicity

As a result of Constantinople’s US-financed aggression against the Russian Church in the Ukraine, begun in December 2018, the crisis among Local Orthodox Churches continues. The Russian Church is out of communion with Constantinople and several Greek Churches, or parts of them, and all for purely political reasons. Moreover, this Ukrainian division between Moscow, 70% of the Orthodox world, and Constantinople, one of the smallest but also the most prestigious of the Patriarchates of the Orthodox world, which followed the division in Estonia thirty years ago, has now also spread to Lithuania.

Meanwhile, Moscow and its out-of-control schismatic and sectarian ROCOR branch, which has still not been called to account for breaking communion with Moscow’s Western European branch, again all for political reasons, have been trying to impose themselves. The swamp has not been drained. All this means, ‘imposing’ their compromised authority against some of their most senior pastors by using the canons politically! The result is that all their uncanonically ‘defrocked’ pastors, the ones who have integrity and principles, are taken into other Patriarchates, not least into Constantinople. The political use of the canons is only that – uncanonical. Those who do that subject themselves to canonical and spiritual punishment.

As a result of all this, the situation in Africa is appalling, with the Church there split into two and the Patriarchate of Alexandria ‘defrocking’ poor Africans. The poor African Orthodox, deprived of everything, have become political pawns between Moscow and Alexandria. There is still an uneasy peace between the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Now there is tension between the Patriarchates of Moscow and Bucharest about the canonical jurisdiction of the Orthodox churches in Moldova, with Moscow again ‘defrocking’ many clergy for purely political reasons, as also in Lithuania and Russia. The Romanian Church accepts them all, ignoring the abuse of the canons, just as Moscow ignores the very same misuse in Africa and elsewhere.

All these arguments and divisions are about territory. This has long been the case in the Diaspora in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia. All that has happened is that more territories, the Ukraine, Africa and the Baltics, have been added to the disputed list of the Diaspora. For where there are churches on a territory, there is income. In other words, all these sordid stories are about sordid money. And money is power. Just as Judas sold out Christ for money and power, so now they do the same. The simple people, families, clergy and monastics, are all betrayed by those who are supposedly spiritual guides!! What is to be done?

On 17 March 2024 two letters of His Beatitude Archbishop Anastasios of Albania were published. These were written to Patriarch Theodore of Alexandria concerning the Russian Orthodox Church’s African Exarchate’s activity on the canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. The first letter is from 7 February 2023, the second is from 14 March 2024. As a real archpastor, Archbishop Anastasios takes a mediating position, offering both support and criticism as necessary. He has consistently opposed Constantinople’s interference in the canonical Ukrainian Church and the creation of a gangster group called the ‘Orthodox Church of Ukraine’.

Archbishop Anastasios has also written to persecuted hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, assuring them of his prayerful support against Constantinople’s gangsters. However, he has also told Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow that he does not support the Russian Synod’s decision to break communion with Constantinople. In February 2023 Archbishop Anastasios stated plainly: ‘The incursion of the Patriarchate of Moscow into Africa (done in revenge for what Constantinople had done in the Ukraine) was clearly an unacceptable anti-canonical action, undermining the unity and the missionary work of the Orthodox Church. What you describe in detail confirms that a clear schism is unfolding within Orthodoxy’.

At the same time, the Archbishop told Patriarch Theodore: ‘Our long Church experience and theological engagement confirm that the tactic of reprisals, however justified it may seem, does not solve problems; instead, the prolongation of the conflict deepens the wounds. What is needed is the therapy of reconciliation and resolution’. As the Archpastor has done repeatedly since 2018, he again calls for a pan-Orthodox Synod to resolve the problems in the Ukraine and Africa.

His letter from March of this year repeats the same points: ‘We clearly do not agree with the demonstration of power on the part of the Patriarchate of Moscow, especially in the sensitive area of mission in Africa. We clearly deem such methods unacceptable and condemnable. Equally, we do not agree with the adoption of a similar mentality and methods of reaction – with the depositions of hierarchs and the creation of a climate of tension among the Orthodox Churches in the media. On 16 February 2024 the Alexandria Synod decided that it was ‘defrocking’ Bishop Konstantin of Zaraisk, the Russian Church’s second African Exarch. The Synod had already decided to ‘defrock’ the first Exarch, Metropolitan Leonid of Klin, in November 2022 in addition to two Russian priests in February 2022. (Metr Leonid has since been defrocked by Moscow itself, like so many of its recent bishops, but that is another story…).

Unilateral actions offer nothing to Church unity, says the Archbishop. ‘The problems that have arisen in recent years, due to the end of Eucharistic communion between Orthodox Patriarchates, cannot be resolved through unilateral decisions and announcements’. Again he calls for a Council of the whole Orthodox Church. In this way His Beatitude sums up the views of hundreds of politically free Orthodox bishops, in Albania, Romania, Antioch, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland, Georgia and in other Local Churches, and indeed the views of the vast majority of Church people and clergy.

Enough is enough. Let them stop doing things for political and nationalistic reasons, let them do what they do for Church reasons. In disputed territories, enlightened politicians allow the people to choose for themselves which country they want to belong to. This is called self-determination. Why not apply the same principle to territories that are in dispute between Churches, such as Moldova? Such matters can be debated in a free Council. The Inter-Orthodox Royal way, that is, the Conciliar and Catholic way is the only way. This is the multilateral and multipolar, not unilateral and unipolar, way.

After the US proxy war in the Ukraine ends with the inevitable Russian victory, the Church situation there will have to be resolved by the granting of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Its future territory will be defined by the coming peace agreement between Moscow and Kiev. The Russian State has won the war there, but that only means that the Russian Church will have to be magnanimous in victory and do what should have been done over thirty years ago: Grant the Church of the New Ukraine autocephaly – full independence. Otherwise their churches in the Ukraine will be empty and bankrupt.

The desovietisation, that is, decentralisation, of the Russian Church is inevitable. This concerns not just the Ukraine, but elsewhere, in the republics born out of the USSR which collapsed in 1991 not because of some mythical victory of the West, but because of its faulty economics. As the new generation that grew up after the collapse of the USSR comes to the Russian episcopate, all will change and the old-fashioned centralising nightmare will end anyway. The Russian Church, like the Church of Constantinople, will have to return to the mainstream, the Royal Way. Then the Constantinople schism can also be resolved and schismatics, whether Russian or Greek, called to account. All this confirms that every division in the Church is always caused by politics, by this world. There is nothing spiritual in any of this at all. It is sordid.

Thoughts on the Orthodox Future of the Post-Western World, Europe and England

Introduction: After the Defeat of the West

Even Western-sponsored Ukrainian terrorism has failed. The Western media are none too keen to expose the Western defeat in the Ukraine and so the media are now largely falling silent about the Ukraine. The US and the EU have completely failed to weaken, destroy, dismantle and balkanise Russia into between 18 and 32 separate republics by illegally sanctioning it and then overthrowing its government. The West wanted to do to Russia what it had done to Yugoslavia. ‘Since we can bomb and destroy Belgrade, let us bomb and destroy Moscow’, was the fantasy. This aim was publicly announced in the 2019 Rand Corporation report in the USA. According to this report, Russia had to be destroyed in order then in turn to weaken China. This was to be done by manipulating (and then betraying) NATO-armed Ukrainian proxies, in whom it otherwise has no interest (as Borrell has openly admitted), into dying for Western aims ‘to the last Ukrainian’. Among the western Ukrainians they found pro-Nazi Russia-haters. They were the ideal useful idiots for use as cannon fodder.

After the Western defeat the world is entering the post-Western age, the real New World Order. The West is old and tired, its symbol is the dementia of the US President, who with his minders confuses wishful thinking with reality, the virtual world with the real world. The end comes after a thousand years of domination and exploitation, firstly by Western European Empires, Papist and then Protestant, and since 1945 by the Secularist USA. Through its war on Russia through the Ukraine, the West totally isolated itself from the Global Majority, which mocks its ruling imperialist caste and its age-old visceral hatred, inspired by jealousy and greed, of Russia. Western Europe has lost the last traces of its prestige, as symbolised by the humiliating ejection of colonial France from West Africa. The new multipolar world, founded by the Russian-initiated BRICS Alliance, is going to look very different from the old one. Western Europe will of course still exist, but simply as a Region equal among many others in the global community.

As for the USA, it is going to go home to lick its wounds and sort out its debt and internal chaos and decadence after 35 years of hubris, arrogance and delusion and two recent routs, first in Kabul, then in Kiev. Perhaps then, and only then, God will bless America, which for now appears to have cursed itself. The millennial defeat of the West means that it must admit that it has been humiliated, that its values were false all along. It will have to rethink its whole place in the world and ponder on its tragic history, becoming humble in the face of reality instead of delusion. The Western ideology of arrogant military superiority, enforced since the eleventh-century Crusades by superior forms of organised violence and murder, including through illegal economic sanctions, is discredited. So what will the future world, the future Western Europe and specifically the future England look like? First, let us look at the post-Western world in general.

The Twelve Regions of the Post-Western Multipolar World

Eurasia (The Russian World of the East Slav Three, ‘Rus’, together with the three independent republics of the Caucasus and the five of Central Asia)
Western Europe (See below)
East Asia (The Chinese World, also Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, Japan and the Philippines)
South East Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia)
South Asia (The Indian World and countries around it, including Pakistan and Afghanistan)
West Asia (the former so-called ‘Middle East’, including the Arab World, Turkiye, Iran and Iraq)
Northern Africa (largely Muslim)
Southern Africa (sub-Saharan Africa, largely Christian)
Northern America (the USA, Canada and Greenland, largely English-speaking)
Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean (led by Mexico)
South America (led by Brazil)
Oceania (led by Australia and with a tiny population)

Two of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches are in Region 1 and ten of them are in Region 2. We suggest that Region 1 needs initially another three Local Churches to cover the Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Asia (the five stans). Two of the Local Churches (Jerusalem and Antioch) should cover Region 6. One Church, Alexandria, should cover Regions 7 and 8. There is one disputed Local Church in Region 9. We suggest that Region 2 initially needs seven new Local Churches (see below), Region 3 initially needs two (for China and Japan), a Local Church for China and another for Japan. Regions 4, 5, 10, 11 and 12 all initially need one new Local Church each. This would bring the total number of Local Churches to 33, the number of the age of Christ. Some of these new Local Churches would at first only become autonomous (partly independent) while waiting to grow and mature, others would from the start become autocephalous (fully independent).

The Four Confederative Regions of Western Europe in the Multipolar World

Western Europe means the western half of Europe (54%), not the eastern half (46%), which consists of Belarus, the Ukraine and Russian Europe. Its Americanisation began in 1942 in the UK, then in 1944-5 in the Western half of the Continent, spreading eastwards in 1989. After the end of US unionist organisations like NATO and the EU, what could its future be? We suggest its future is as four Regions which have common histories:

North-East Europe (Poland, Finland and the three Baltic States, formerly largely part of the Russian Empire). All these five countries could be taken care of by the Polish Orthodox Church, to be renamed the Baltic Orthodox Church.
South-East Europe (the racially very mixed former Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire in Europe, nearly a half of which is Orthodox Christian: Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, European Turkiye, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia). This Region has nine Local Orthodox Churches. We suggest a new binational Local Church should be founded for Hungary and Austria, similar to that which already exists for Czechia and Slovakia.
North-West Europe (the largely Germanic world: Iceland, Ireland, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Flanders, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein). None of this region has its own Local Church. We suggest three, one for Germany, the Netherlands, Flanders, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Liechtenstein; one for the British Isles and Ireland; one for the four countries of Scandinavia.
South-West Europe (the largely Latin world: France, Wallonia, Monaco, Italy, San Marino, Malta, Andorra, Spain, Portugal). None of this Region has its own Local Church. We suggest three, one for Iberia, one for Italy, San Marino and Malta and one for France, Flanders and Monaco.

At present this Western Europe consists of 42 countries. However, if one day, for example, Serbia and Montenegro reunite and Bosnia-Herzegovina dissolves back into Serbia and Croatia, once US pressure for Balkanisation is removed, Moldova and Romania reunite, and Belgium dissolves into Flanders, going back to the Netherlands, and Wallonia, going back to France, but the UK separates into its constituent parts of England, Scotland and Wales (with Northern Ireland returning to the Republic of Ireland), that would make 40 countries.

The four Regions of Western Europe could form a Western European Confederation and consult in a new Confederative centre. The ideal geographical location for this centre is surely Vienna, the Capital of Austria, in what used to be called Central Europe. Vienna is also closer to Orthodox South-East Europe and to Moscow, both geographically and culturally, and Moscow is effectively the centre of the eastern half of Europe, which stretches to the Urals, but also far beyond that to the Pacific, so providing Belt and Road connectivity to China. Moscow is also the capital of Russia, which has the largest economy in Europe and is its main source of energy.

The Decomposed and Recomposed ex-United Kingdom and Reunited Ireland as an Example of Future Western European Countries

The United Kingdom (UK) is a state as artificially-invented and disunited as the Ukraine or Belgium, and was invented just over a century ago. It is reigned over by a Dutch-German Royal House, ingloriously imported by regime change by the Norman-founded Establishment and City of London merchants for their ‘Great British’ manipulation from 1688 on. Since 1956 the UK has been governed as a satellite of the US-controlled British branch of the Globalist Uniparty. This is why, only recently, Brexit did not take place under the opportunist Johnson, who never believed in anything apart from himself. Since his sacking for disobeying his own laws, the UK has been ruled by unelected Prime Ministers and reigned over by an unelected and disliked King. It may be time to find a new dynasty, a new Royal House of England, perhaps composed for the first time since 1066 of Englishmen and Englishwomen?

Both Left and Right agree that the future lies in the so far vitally absent policies of National Identity and Social Justice, the two things that the Globalist Uniparty does not allow and which it contemptuously dismisses as ‘populism’. The alien British Establishment hates the three peoples, the last which still remain directly under its tyranny, the English, the Scottish and the Welsh. If all the peoples of the former UK could free themselves from Globalist tyranny, denormanising themselves, they could form an Anglo-Celtic Confederation, together with a reunited Ireland, to be called perhaps ‘IONA’, the Isles of the North Atlantic, with an administrative capital at the central point of the Isle of Man, from where all four countries are visible. Four Countries, One Confederation.

Conclusion: The Future of the Western Half of Europe

As US troops are at last pulled out of Western Europe, eighty years late, a result of NATO’s comprehensive rout in the US war against Russia in the Ukraine, fear and panic have begun to spread among the US-appointed elites in Western European capitals. Like children who have been abandoned by their parents who used to tell them what to say and do, now they do not know what to say and do in their empty house. Like those who were subject to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, they are frightened of freedom and prefer to be serfs and vassals. They are like drug addicts who have run out of drugs. It is time for the alien and narcissistic ruling caste, which rules by intimidation, creating fear, anxiety, stress and bogeymen among the people (Communism, Islamism, Brexit, Covid, Putin etc), to be replaced by those who do not gaslight because they have come up from the people and can represent them.

As NATO is disbanded, so every Western European country can make huge savings on so-called ‘defence’. Western Europe can be denuclearised and demilitarised. The money saved can go to improve its derelict infrastructure and public services, which have largely become disservices, and paying off its crippling debts, inflicted by the ruling class. Once the Western ruling caste has been ejected, good relations can be established with Russia and the eastern half of Europe composed of the three countries that form the Union State. There is little doubt that the three States, Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus, will be cleansed and come to be ruled officially by a new Tsar. In this way, work towards rediscovering local patriotic identities and implementing social justice may be carried out in the other countries of Western Europe, which suffer from similar oppression as in the ex-UK.

Once despised and repressed by the USA, they can now become creative once more by reference to their roots. At the same time, in the new multipolar world those countries would have to work together. Not in a Unionist, ‘one size fits all’ form, as in the old and hated, US-imposed European Union with its anti-democratic Commissar gauleiters, who in panic face Eurexit in their failure to create a mythical Europe, but in a Regional Confederative form. Western European countries have to adapt to Freedom – to their real place in the new multipolar world, returning to their identities which are rooted in their still undiscovered and concealed first millennium. This process of the dewesternisation of the West is what we have been speaking of for nearly two generations. It is now under way and presents both challenges, but also extraordinary opportunities, both political and spiritual.

Why the Kiev Dictatorship has not been able to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

https://spzh.media/en/zashhita-very/79475-why-hasnt-the-authorities-banned-the-uoc-yet

Why haven’t the authorities banned the UOC yet?

28 March 14:01

1264

Author: Kirill Aleksandrov

The campaign to ban the UOC has entered a new stage. Journalists are jailed, MPs can be sanctioned, and the West made the first anti-church publication. What’s going on?

After the attack on March 12, 2024, on UOJ journalists and church rights activists by the SBU, it was expected that this would catalyze the adoption of the anti-church bill 8371 banning the UOC (along with the final seizure of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra). With the journalists being silenced and rights activists intimidated and detained, it should be painless to vote to ban the Church, according to the logic of the orchestrators of these events.

However, something went awry. The vote, slated for March 20, 2024, had to be postponed. MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak announced on his Telegram channel that bills were being removed from the agenda altogether. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, many deputies, including those from the presidential faction “Servant of the People”, simply sabotage meetings and do not come to work in the Verkhovna Rada. Secondly, the Rada has accumulated quite a lot of unpopular, controversial, and scandalous bills. As IT specialists say in such cases, applications begin to conflict with each other.

In other words, using administrative resources, you can push through a vote on one scandalous bill, but not on all at once. Therefore, administrative resources have to prioritize bills, while parliamentarians calculate which bill’s vote could cause them more tangible troubles.

As it turned out, Bill 8371 banning the UOC is the biggest trouble, not only to the country as a whole, but also to each individual deputy personally.

Amsterdam’s warning

On March 15, 2024, UOC lawyer Robert Amsterdam wrote a letter to the parliament speaker and members of parliament, not for the first time explaining that bill 8371 is unconstitutional and unlawful, and its adoption will not only tarnish Ukraine’s image as a non-democratic state but also expose the MPs who vote for it to certain packages of Western sanctions. Moreover, this applies not only to the vote in the Verkhovna Rada but also to other persecutions against the UOC: seizures of churches, beatings of believers, and so on.

One of the most well-known sanction packages of this kind is the so-called “Magnitsky List”. But in many countries, there are similar lists that include officials and public figures who violate fundamental human rights. According to R. Amsterdam, these lists include individuals for much less significant human rights violations than those committed against UOC believers in Ukraine.

Amsterdam’s warning caused a very nervous reaction in the Verkhovna Rada, which the lawyer himself described as apoplectic.

This means that the deputies took the warnings seriously and had second thoughts to the effect whether it was worth playing with fire, as sanctions may involve entry bans to EU countries, the USA, asset freezes, and other dismal consequences.

In view of Amsterdam’s warning, an emergency meeting of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy was convened in the Verkhovna Rada on March 18, 2024, and they were so outraged by the activities of the American lawyer that they called his warnings threats and decided to complain to the SBU. MP from the party of former President P. Poroshenko’s “European Solidarity” Iryna Herashchenko called the warnings fake, while pressure on deputies – interference in the work of state institutions. She even wondered if sanctions should be imposed on R. Amsterdam.

However, Mrs. Herashchenko did not consider that, firstly, imposing sanctions against human rights defenders for their legitimate human rights activities is akin to authoritarian, not democratic countries. Secondly, by her excessive reaction to the warnings, she (like other MPs) actually indicates that these warnings sound quite serious and authoritative. Well, and thirdly, if, for example, adults warn a child not to put nails in the socket because it will shock them, does it mean pressure on the child and an infringement of their freedom?

They will take a different path

Apparently, Amsterdam did make an impression on the Verkhovna Rada MPs, as the authorities decided to first prepare Western public opinion for the adoption of the anti-church bill 8371, and only then put it to a vote.

The head of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, Mykyta Poturaev, suggested sending a delegation of MPs and representatives of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches to the US to try to explain to the American establishment that violating the right to freedom of conscience is not considered a violation as long as it is directed against the UOC.

One might assume that this attempt will be unsuccessful, since both the US and European countries are perfectly aware of what human rights are and what constitutes their violation. However, there is still a certain hope for success, as it was the Americans who lobbied for the creation of the OCU and subsequently provided it with active support and assistance. Moreover, this support was demonstrated by representatives of both the Republican and Democratic parties. However, in our opinion, American lobbyists for the OCU did not anticipate that it would come to the point of forcible seizures of churches, mass violations of legislation during the re-registration of communities, and now to the prohibition of the UOC at the legislative level.

On March 21, 2024, Ukrainian political analyst Kostiantyn Bondarenko announced on his Telegram channel that the Office of the President had ordered several Western editions to publish articles against the UOC, in defense of the anti-church bill 8371, justifying the persecution of the Church, as well as discrediting lawyer R. Amsterdam and his human rights activities. K. Bondarenko also mentioned the considerable budget for such an order – over $2.5 million in March and April 2024.

No sooner said than done – and on March 22, 2024, the first customized article appeared in The Wall Street Journal titled “Is Religious Liberty ‘Under Attack’ in Ukraine?” Its author, a certain Jillian Kay Melchior, believes that liberty is not under attack in Ukraine, but “the country faces a dilemma in how to deal with an Orthodox church controlled by Russia” and with R. Amsterdam, who spreads fakes about persecution of the Church.

The text of the article itself gives the impression that it was written by poorly talented authors in Ukraine, offering blunt narratives and unsubstantiated claims. If Jillian Melchior is indeed an American journalist, why didn’t she even bother to edit the following paragraph: “Five years ago, the Patriarch of Constantinople recognized the fully independent, self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine. But the ROC and the UOC-MP refuse to recognize the OCU”?

Firstly, there is no UOC-MP in nature (this is an invention of the Church’s internal Ukrainian enemies), there is only the UOC. Secondly, the right to recognize or not recognize the decisions of the Patriarch of Constantinople is part of religious freedom, the right to freedom of belief.

Any community, any believer can recognise or not recognise the decisions of the Patriarch of Constantinople, just like any other religious leader, which is their constitutional right.

The content of the article contains so many unsubstantiated statements and accusations that there will be a significant workload for lawyers and human rights defenders to hold the publication accountable for causing moral harm and baseless discredit. For instance, it claims that the UOC-MP provided material support for Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the East of Ukraine in 2014. Where is the evidence? For such a statement is definitely hazardous for one’s reputation.

In the United States, as in other developed countries, there is a clear distinction between the actions of individuals and the actions of organizations. In other words, we speak about individual responsibility vs. collective responsibility. The fact that individual believers and even priests of the UOC supported Russia’s aggression does not in any way prove the guilt of the entire Church.

In this regard, we cannot ignore the recent statement by the head of the SBU, V. Maliuk. On March 26, 2024, in an interview with “Facts ICTV”, he stated that to date, the court has sentenced 23 clergymen. And a total of 37 suspicions have been announced to representatives of the UOC clergy, with more than 80 criminal cases opened. Let’s reiterate it: 23 convictions! And now let’s compare this figure with the numbers of traitors in the SBU itself. Back in 2016, the SBU published on its website a list of its former employees who defected to Russia, which consisted of 1391 (!) people, including one major general and 47 colonels.

Simon Shuster in his book “Showman” about Volodymyr Zelensky quotes former Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov, who said that at the beginning of the full-scale war, the most desertions among the security forces were in the SBU. The exact number was not given, but it was said that “their departure depleted the ranks of the SBU.” So where are the bills to ban the SBU? Where are the accusations of undermining national security? Where are the calls to hold the entire SBU accountable for the actions of these employees?

It can be assumed that such an experienced lawyer as R. Amsterdam will certainly use these facts as arguments in support of his position.

Actions in defense of the UOC

Supporters of the UOC are also not sitting idly by, but taking vigorous actions to defend their Church. On March 26, 2024, the United Nations Ukraine website published a report from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “On the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine”. It asserts that over the past three months, “clergymen and parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continued to experience intimidation.”

The report describes several cases of violent seizure of temples. On the same day, an interview with the UOC lawyer, Archpriest Nikita Chekman, was published on the YouTube channel of the NGO Public Advocacy, a human rights organization. The interview discusses specific violations of the rights of UOC believers, forcible seizure of temples, searches at the Center for Legal Protection of UOC Believers, arrests of journalists from the UOJ, and so on.

These facts of violations of believers’ rights will be disseminated among international human rights organizations and will also be heard at the UN Human Rights Session.

In other words, defenders of the UOC are doing everything possible to draw the attention of the international community to violations of UOC believers’ rights. And in competition with adversaries of the UOC trying to prove the opposite, defenders of the UOC seem to have a more fair chance to win. After all, there are so many offenses committed over the past 10 years that hiding or misinterpreting them is no longer possible. Moreover, most of them are well documented and formulated as statements to law enforcement and judicial authorities of Ukraine.

In addition, the Ukrainian authorities have decided to take actions that are almost zero-tolerated in the West. We are talking about encroachments on journalistic activity and the work of lawyers. Unfounded arrests of Orthodox journalists and gross unlawful interference in legal practice are perceived extremely negatively in the West.

But relying on the assistance of the international community and the reaction of Western countries to the violation of the right to freedom of conscience in Ukraine is not enough. The most important thing is the steadfastness and fortitude of believers within the country.

The guarantee of the existence of the UOC is not the protection from American or other lawyers, but the fidelity of believers to their Church, the readiness to defend their religious beliefs despite threats and intimidation.

You can take away the temple, but you cannot take away faith. You can illegally re-register a community, but if the community confirms its loyalty to the UOC and its Primate Metropolitan Onuphry, then it remains in the fold of the Church, and people continue to be in communion with all Christians as members of the Body of Christ. This cannot be fought or overcome by any anti-church laws or prohibitions. Our strength is in the fidelity to our religious choice, fidelity to Christ, in fulfilling His commandments.

What might happen next

Most likely, the anti-church bill 8371 will be put on hold for some time. They will wait for the reaction of Western society to the commissioned articles against the UOC and its defenders. Perhaps they will send a delegation of officials and representatives of various denominations to the United States, who will try to convince their counterparts that there is no persecution for faith in Ukraine. Unfortunately, things like church raids and illegal re-registrations of UOC communities in favor of the OCU will continue. But the decisive steps of the authorities to ban the UOC (or the absence of such steps) will mainly depend on the situation on the fronts.

This is all nothing new. Any authority, in various failures, tries to redirect public anger to someone else. It has always been this way. Let’s remember the very first persecution of Christians under Emperor Nero. When in 64 AD almost the entire Rome burned down and the citizens guessed that the emperor had himself set fire to the city, then the authorities, without much thought, accused the Christians of arson.

A new religion, incomprehensible, suspicious – is a very convenient target to redirect the crowd’s anger. The same thing can happen today.

If military failures follow, the authorities may intensify persecution of the Church so that Ukrainian society sees the UOC as an enemy, shifts its focus to dealing with it, and does not ask inconvenient questions from the authorities. But this is only one of many factors that will influence the situation. The opinions of Western countries and the struggle for power within Ukraine will also have their impact, inter alia.

Anyway, the most important thing is God’s providence, which can steer the situation in ways that no one currently anticipates. “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails” (Proverbs 19:21).