Category Archives: The Ukraine

Eight Propaganda Myths about the Conflict in the Ukraine

  1. Putin is a new Hitler and he must not be appeased.

However much Putin is worthy of being liked or being hated, one thing is certain: the facts state that his policies are quite different from Hitler’s and from the appeasement by Western leaders regarding his invasion of the then Czechoslovakia. The ‘Putler’ myth was invented and repeated by politicians and journalists who know nothing either of the facts of Czechoslovak history or of the Ukraine.

Czechoslovakia was not formed out of Germany, it was formed out of Austria-Hungary after 1917. Czechoslovakia had a small German-speaking minority, which lived on excellent terms with the Czechs. However, the Ukraine was formed out of Russia after 1917 and had a Russian-speaking majority, about 53%, whose language, religion and culture were severely persecuted by the anti-democratically Western-installed Kiev Fascist regime. Hitler’s forces mounted a full-scale, unprovoked invasion of Czechoslovakia to take over the whole Czech part of the country, whereas limited Russian forces, numbering only about 100,000, entered Eastern Ukraine to liberate it alone from Kiev genocide (14,000 Eastern Ukrainians murdered since 2014), with NATO-trained Kiev forces of some 800,000 massing on its border to implement ‘the final solution’ and Kiev threats of biological and nuclear warfare against Russia. Russian forces gathered only in order to force peace talks. To mount a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine would take 1-2 million troops.

Hitler wanted ‘Lebensraum’, Putin, as the leader of by far the largest country in the world, does not want that at all, he wants people to live in freedom from Fascism and have their own language, culture and religion. Hitler hated the ‘subhuman’ Czechs, Putin loves the Ukrainian people, which is why hardly any Ukrainian civilians have died in this conflict. He sees Ukrainians as the persecuted brothers of Russians who live by the border (‘U kraja’). The ideology of Hitler was anti-Slav Nazism, just like the Fascist and racist ideology of the Western-created Kiev regime, whereas the ideology of Putin is Russian nationalism. For eight long years Putin tried to negotiate peace with Kiev’s Western puppeteers, but they lied, cheated and refused even to speak with him. This was not the case of Hitler, who did not want to negotiate at all – just like the Fascist regime in Kiev. Virtually the whole world abhorred Hitler, virtually the whole world either supports Russia or else remains neutral in the Russian fight for survival against Western aggression. It is the Nazi-supporting Western world which is isolated, not Russia. NATO, which controlled the Kiev armed forces, was founded by Nazi Germans, whereas the Russian Army evolved from the Nazi-hating Red Army.

  1. Russia is an existential threat to Western Europe

The NATO-armed, -financed, -supplied, -trained and -installed Kiev regime was an existential threat to Russia. It had by far the largest NATO Army, a mass of CIA operations and military biolabs, the ongoing genocide of the Russian-speaking population in the east of the Ukraine and the threat to obtain nuclear arms. All of this went against the Ukrainian Constitution, which was founded on neutrality. As the unelected EU ‘Foreign Minister’ Kallas has openly said, the aim of the Western proxy war in the Ukraine is to destroy and break up Russia, and as a NATO general said, he wants to invade Russian Kaliningrad in one day.

However, Russia is not at all an existential threat to Europe. It wants only a neutral Ukraine and does not want even to occupy the Ukraine, let alone any territory beyond that. It wants to take back the Russian part of the Ukraine and let the rest live its life but as a neutral, demilitarised country, rather as was the Kaiser’s aim in France in 1914.

Russia is not an existential threat to Europe, but it is to the wealthy European ruling class, which flies Ukrainian flags, with its millennial imperialism (‘globalism’) and racist supremacism, aggressive expansionism eastwards, financial corruption, the debauchery of its sexual perverts and cocaine addicts, and pedophile institutions like the BBC and parts of Western religious establishments. This unelected elite of oligarchs opposes diplomacy because it wants to continue the war, rejecting all peace talks because it wants to justify its highly profitable NATO. It justifies its existence by imaginary threats from Russia. It cannot lose face, but Trump can, by branding this ‘Biden’s War’, so blaming it on someone else.

  1. Russia has not been successful in the Ukraine because it has not learned the lessons of the past.

Invasions of Russia by the Collective West have been very common for centuries, even well before that of Napoleon in 1812. The threatened invasion of Russian-populated territory in March 2022, carefully prepared from 2014, and even before, had been anticipated by President Putin. He had clearly learned the lessons of mistakes made by Russia before previous Western invasions.

Firstly, he had learned lessons from the Western invasion of Russia through the Crimea in 1853-1856. Here Russia had been undermined economically by Western sanctions and by its use of old-fashioned rifles. As a result, the British destroyed the (British-built) port of Sevastopol and the war ended in a stalemate, portrayed in the West as a victory. Lesson: Use advanced military technology and be prepared for sanctions.

In 1903-4 the West attacked Russia through a proxy, Japan, which the West had armed and financed, almost bankrupting Japan, with modern battleships. Japan attacked Russia unannounced, just as they later did at Pearl Harbour, and the Russian Fleet was humiliated. Although the Russian land war went relatively well and was on the verge of victory, Russia was betrayed by internal political enemies who created social disorder and Russia had to agree to peace talks. Lesson: Build a strong Navy and ensure there is no reason for internal disorder.

In World War One, by the start of 1917, a rearmed Russia was on the verge of victory over Germany and Austro-Hungary, but it was betrayed by the treason of the Germans, the British (and other pseudo-allies), its own treasonous generals, aristocrats, politicians and the lies of treasonous but uncensored journalists, and lost. Lesson: Do not allow treason, be prepared to arrest foreign spies and aristocratic and other traitors, and use censorship.

In 1941, Hitler and all his Western allies attacked the Soviet Union and was at first immensely victorious on account of Stalin’s inept leadership which had left his armed forces totally unprepared. The situation was turned around when Stalin handed over leadership to the military professionals who had been trained in the Tsar’s armed forces. Lesson: Be prepared for a treacherous attack and let military professionals deal with any aggression.

Russia has been successful precisely because it has learned the lessons of the past Western invasions of Russia.

4. Negotiations bring an end to wars.

Wars are not generally ended by negotiations, they end with victory and defeat on the battlefield, like the First and Second World Wars. The negotiations follow defeats.

  1. Russia is losing because it has scarcely taken any territory since 2022.

By far the biggest country in the world, Russia does not want any extra territory. It wants security guarantees. Its aims were clearly stated on 14 February 2022 and have not changed since then and the main aim was to destroy the Ukrainian military by attrition. This means avoid making frontal attacks and waiting to be attacked by the enemy. Defenders suffer less than attackers.

The dreadful conflict in the Ukraine is then a war of attrition. Wars of attrition, like the First and Second World Wars, continue slowly for several years, with little movement, and then end suddenly. Thus, the First World War ended in five months between July and November 1918 after four years of attrition before that, and the Second World War ended in eleven months between Operation Bagration in June 1944 and D-Day and the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz and Berlin in May 1945, after five years of attrition before that. Russia is no hurry in the Ukraine, on the contrary, the longer it takes, the more the West is weakened.

  1. Russia wants to occupy the whole of the Ukraine.

The Ukraine is an artificial state, formed by three tyrannical Communist dictators, Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, who brutally stole parts of Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania to form the present, Soviet-bordered, Ukraine. Russia wants to recreate the historic Ukraine, more exactly ‘Kievan Rus’, within its real borders. The models for any future Ukraine are therefore Federal and democratic Switzerland, its neutrality guaranteed in 1820 and never violated since, or, in the second half of the last century, Finland and Austria.

  1. The Ukraine is a viable state.

The Ukraine has been renowned for thirty-five years as the most corrupt of the former Soviet Republics, ruled by the thirteen oligarchs, mainly non-Ukrainian, and a country deprived of human rights. The Ukraine has for long been bankrupt and now has the highest death-rate and lowest birth-rate in the world. Viable?

  1. Russia is a non-democratic, authoritarian regime.

The Russian President has for 25 years always gained between 60% and 85% of the popular vote. The EU Commissioners are unelected and all the Western leaders, who are now trying to impose censorship, were chosen by oligarchs and elected by between only 20% and 35% of their electorates. Perhaps the real leader of the Free World is President Putin?

Next week Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is having to visit the USA. Almost certainly he will be told to abandon his gangster church in the Ukraine. It is one of the Russian conditions for peace, to have a Church that the people recognise, and not a nationalist State organisation imposed top-down, which the people ignore.

 

Europe and the Ukraine: Away From Union and Towards Federation?

The Return to Normality through the Renewal of Multipolarity

The post-1945 Western/Globalist Order is over. It is dying at its own hands, by suicide, having voluntarily cut itself off from cheap Russian energy. True, Western Europeans still cling on to their imperial and colonial illusions and the relics of that Order, like NATO and the EU. However, in the USA, on which that Order depended, they have been realising that it is over. Thus, on 1 February 2025 the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio finally admitted this shift in the global power structure, stating that the unipolar (=US-controlled) moment was an anomaly and that the international community is returning to its multipolar framework. That multipolar world has been ushered in by the BRICS Organisation, founded by Russia in Ekaterinburg on the 90th anniversary of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas who foresaw it, but it is ignored by Western Europeans who are stuck in the past. This means that the USA is now again just one of the Great Powers in the world, having been pulled down by its hubris that caused it to overreach and go bankrupt amid a string of political, military and economic defeats. Those defeats have finally helped it realise the new reality.

Bodybags of UK and US Corpses from the Ukraine at Lakenheath

I live under the flight path which runs between the very important US base at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, and Borispil, the main airport in Kiev. Flights overhead were very frequent in the second half of 2021. In October 2021 I saw why, when I visited Kiev again. I well remember seeing with surprise the massive numbers of NATO armoured vehicles and arms quite openly being unloaded and stored at Borispil in preparation for some new Kiev invasion of the Eastern Ukraine. These huge stores were among the very first to be destroyed by Russian missiles on 24 February 2022. Since then, flights from Lakenheath have varied in numbers according to the needs of NATO campaigning in its proxy war in the Ukraine, where the war is directed from the major US bases in Germany, in Wiesbaden and Rammstein. Last week a large US transport plane flew into Lakenheath from Kiev. According to someone I know well who works at the base, it was full of corpses of US and UK troops. These included those who had died after the Russian raid on Kharkov and their Special Forces raid on Ochakiv near Nikolaev, where three British operatives, officers and MI6, were captured.

Alaska Means Europe is Isolated

The bodybags in Lakenheath came against the background of the carefully-prepared meeting in Anchorage, Alaska last week. Russia only agreed to this, as Trump had promised to meet all the Russian conditions. We were reminded that, given Europe’s political, economic and military hostility to Russia, the latter no longer looks to Europe, but to Asia. As for the USA, given Europe’s political, economic and military irrelevance in today’s world, it too no longer looks to Europe, but towards Asia. We are reminded that even physically the USA and Russia are separated by only three miles, not by the Atlantic Ocean like Europe. Now it is Russia and the US versus old-fashioned Cold War Europe and the authoritarian puppet regime in Kiev. The old Unionist and aggressive Neo-Nazi Europe (the EU and UK elite) is isolated, only the inevitable and perhaps imminent fall of the already highly unpopular elites there can bring Europe back into the mainstream of the world. For the new USA and the new Russia are both set on finding a permanent peace that ends the proxy war, already lost by the West as Trump at least has realised, on the battlefield of the Ukraine.

Europe’s Shameful Decadence: The Fruit of Globalism and Liberalism

The Western European conglomerate (EU/UK/Kiev) is not only morally irresponsible (Globalism) but also morally decadent (Liberalism), like the ancient pagan Roman Empire. The leaders of ‘the Big Four’ (Germany/ UK/France/Kiev) are all said to be cocaine addicts. One of them certainly is, since the son of the former US President was one and supplied it in the Ukraine, where he lived. (He is also said to have done much worse than cocaine, but his laptop ‘disappeared’). Another is a senior agent for the US Blackrock financial company, which illegally owns much of the old Ukraine (and Germany). Another, a Rothschild banker, is said to be married to a man, who in any case is 24 years older than himself and whose relationship began when the future President was aged fourteen. And the final one, a ‘democrat’ who loves censorship and repression, is said to use Ukrainian male prostitutes and is in love with the Ukrainian dictator. The latter has been illegitimate since May 2024 and has banned the Church and all political opposition and opposition media. He was elected only because he promised to make peace, but instead made a disastrous war and ruined his country.

Europe Has No Cards To Play

It was clear that the USA had begged victorious Russia for the meeting in Alaska and that the Russian President only agreed to it because the US had at last understood Russia’s position and that the continuing war is now entirely the fault of the Kiev regime and its warmongering EU/UK backers. All the Western fantasies about a ceasefire, a frozen conflict, NATO ‘security guarantees’ and sanctions against Russia and its partners have disappeared. As the European vassals and warmongers, fawning on Daddy Trump’s ego, waited like schoolchildren in the corridor in the White House, Trump was teaching Zelensky a lesson about reality and giving him an exit strategy. All the talk that Russia is losing the war and has suffered huge losses is now known by the USA to be a mere ‘narrative’. If the bankrupt Europeans want to buy non-existent US arms with their non-existent money, they can still fantasise about that. The end of the war is in sight. There will be a new Ukraine, a much smaller one, with a democratic, federalised government and a free Church, and not ones imposed by the CIA and MI6. Europe’s problem is it wants peace, but refuses to negotiate.

Karma for Europe’s Double Standards

By psychological transfer the elite of Western European, founded on a millennium of genocide, accused Russia of ‘a full-scale, unprovoked’ invasion of the Ukraine. The Russian support for the liberation of eastern and southern Ukrainians from Kiev Fascism was small-scale and fully-provoked. Large-scale and unprovoked invasions, of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, were, however, carried out, but by the West. The Western elite always uses Orwellspeak, using the opposites to describe others, thus, patriots are called traitors, traitors patriots, authoritarians are called democrats and democrats authoritarians, Fascist Ukrainians are called liberals, even men are called women and women men.  Today the only Soviet Union is the European Union: both were and are run by Western totalitarian ideology. All of this is happening against the background of the demographic crisis, which means, quite literally, that Europe is dying out: the young are mainly immigrants, for Western women have an average of only 0.8 to 1.5 children, the worst case being of course the Ukraine. This suicide is run by the elite, which encourages illegal immigration.

The European Elite Cannot Sell its Failure to its Electorates

The highly unstable and ever-changing European elite of politicians and journalists etc is extremely unpopular with its electorates. The people now vote for new, anti-Establishment parties (AfD, National Rally, Reform etc). None of the elite was elected by even 25% of its electorates, and they have painted themselves into an ever-shrinking corner. Last Saturday only five European leaders out of twenty-seven even signed an anti-Peace statement issued by the unelected EU – the coalition of the unwilling indeed. The senior European elite does not want peace, which is why it tries to prevent peace in Washington. Peace would mean that it has been wrong all along, as it was, and in part responsible for the deaths (or missing) of over 1.72 million Ukrainian soldiers and 120,000 ‘Russian’ (largely eastern Ukrainian) soldiers and civilians. And the elite is also responsible for the self-imposed economic crises in their countries, their crumbling infrastructure and mass poverty. That elite has refused time and again to even talk to Russia about peace. It wants war for its military contractors. Soon it will all be voted out by angry electorates and go into the dustbin of history.

The Evils of Dying Globalism

The Ukrainian battlefield was created by the movement of Unionism, the Globalist movement that reigns supreme in the EU and the UK, and reigned supreme in the USA until the end of last year, when ordinary Americans rejected it in their free election – that which is forbidden in Europe and the Ukraine. Although Trump is himself torn by what to do, he must act – the US faces bankruptcy. Peace could have come in the Ukraine at the outset, but it was forbidden by the EU/UK elite and the dark forces in the USA, who are now more and more excluded from positions of power. The US (Kerry) and Russia had agreed to peace and federalisation even in 2014, but the EU opposed it. Globalism and EU expansion to the Ukraine are the Unionist movements that caused the conflict. Western racism and moral bankruptcy are expressed in the words that the West intends to kill all to the last Ukrainian. The future is the federalised and decentralised BRICS world. This is the future for the New Ukraine, which will soon emerge in its new borders. For now, the EU/UK elite still clings on to past imperial power, failing to catch up with Russia and the USA.

Politicians Inside and Outside the Church Oppose the Catholicity of the Church

This conflict between Unionism and Federalism reflects the constant human rejection of the Divine Model of the Holy Trinity, of Unity in Diversity. That Model has always been rejected throughout history by one human extreme or another, by the forces that centralise and so create national injustices and resentments among minorities, and the forces that divide and so cause warring and sectarian factionalism and xenophobia. In this matter the Russian State is at last far in advance of the administration of the Russian Church. The Russian State founded the multipolar BRICS organisation, whereas the Russian Church has remained, like the Greek Church of Constantinople before it, stuck in its centralising, imperialist, one size fits all, past. In the case of the Russian Church, that centralising past is in Sovietism, in the case of Constantinople that centralising power is the old, and new, Cold War of the CIA, which has controlled it, ever since Patriarch Maximos V was deposed in 1948. All the living forces of the Church await the transfiguring breath of the Holy Spirit, Who will bring back the spirit of Catholicity – unity in diversity and long-awaited decentralisation.

Afterfeast of the Transfiguration 2025

 

 

Meanwhile, in Alaska…

‘The circus left town, but the clowns stayed on’.

Russian saying

The US war against Russia continues in the Ukraine, although the CIA has at various points also tried extending it to the Baltics, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan. President Trump’s bullying threats of illegal secondary tariff-sanctions against those who buy Russian oil, thus against India, although only against India’s gem and diamond industry (he had, as usual, completely misjudged the situation, thinking that India would be a soft touch), and also against Brazil and China, all failed. (Strangely, he did not threaten Europe, which hypocritically buys large amounts of Russian oil from India). In return, India has cancelled its order for further second-rate US warplanes, which Pakistan’s Chinese warplanes easily shot down; China can at any moment withhold its rare earths; Brazil is largely economically independent anyway.

As for his threats to Russia, the latter openly mocks them, as the 30,000 anti-Russian Western sanctions have only made Russia stronger. Trump’s war against BRICS, which is what all this is, has only consolidated its member-nations – the vast majority of the world – against the weaponisation of the dollar and against illegal US sanctions. So, like all bullies who are faced with those who are stronger than himself, Trump cancelled all his threats with excuses, leaving Kiev, whose leader ‘kills everybody’ (as Trump describes him) and the Western European elite in panic. So President Trump sent his real-estate agent envoy Witkoff to Moscow to sue for peace, cap in hand, and beg for a personal meeting with President Putin. Russia holds, as Trump would say in his poker mind, all the cards.

As Trump’s policies are destroying the US economy, his war against Iran failed, the Israeli Gaza genocide and the compromising Mossad/Epstein/Maxwell files hang over him, and Russia is victorious in the routed Ukraine, he is in urgent need of some PR victory. He needs to regain the lost support of his MAGA base. So why not hold a photo opportunity-meeting with the Russian leader? This will take place on 15 August, the feast-day of St Herman of Alaska and the 80th anniversary of the joint US/Soviet victory over Japan. It will be in what used to be called ‘Russian America’, known as Alaska, though Trump still calls it Russia. After secret Russo-American talks, the meeting was carefully prepared there by RF Kennedy a week before it was publicly announced.

The bankrupt US elite has no more money (37 trillion of debt) or any more obsolete arms to send to Kiev. The equally bankrupt Kiev/EU/UK elites are desperate, but there is nothing they can do either, except to continue to lie. Their favourite lie is that all that Russia wants from the Ukraine is some extra land. How absurd for what is by far the largest country and one of the least populated in the world! The war in the Ukraine had only one cause – the expansion of NATO to the east, when the US had time and again promised ‘not another inch to the east’.

In any case, Western arms are ineffective against the more advanced and far more plentiful Russian technology and are greatly depleted anyway. Moreover, disaffected Western peoples are opposed to their elite’s infantile militarism, and their astronomically expensive support for the bandit regime in Kiev (as also for the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv). This is all unacceptable in Western countries whose basic infrastructure is crumbling into third world status. Clearly, when Moscow, on the verge of military victory in the Ukraine, refuses to make any concessions in Alaska, as winning sides do not make concessions, Trump will be left with the ‘offramp’ or exit strategy (escape-route) that he really wants.

This is to walk away from the Kiev regime, stating as his reason the blindingly obvious, that Kiev, which depends on the war and its money to remain in power, does not want peace. This will leave the old Soviet and new Nazi Ukraine to the fate that its leadership has chosen for it, to disappear from the map. Once he has walked away from Kiev, he will claim that he is not responsible for the Western rout and blame it on Biden and the European dictatorships of Starmer, Macron and Merz. He will remain unstained, unlike Biden who was stained by the US rout in Afghanistan. And then Trump will be able to quit NATO, which is what he ultimately wants.

Perhaps, however, the US and Russia will at last come to an agreement about the new Eurasian Security Architecture, meaning a US retreat from its bankruptingly expensive arms spending. The US can leave the Ukraine to Russia on condition that all other national borders in Europe are guaranteed. This will give Trump the chance to grandstand as the great peacemaker and say he has ended the war and brought peace to Europe. True, winning the war will leave the military winner Russia, as the ultra-cautious Russian lawyer-President knows, to win the peace.

But that will be another story, which will also entail radical changes in the over-centralised, bureaucratic and so politically failed policies of the Russian Church, as well as the abolition of the absurd and $20 million CIA gangster fantasy of the ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’. The time of reckoning is coming for all. It is all recorded in the Book of Life.

 

 

125 Years of Putting Off the Inevitable

Introduction: What If?

The First World War was triggered by great imperial rivalries, above all those between Britain and Germany, and financed by the big banks, centred in London and New York, and encouraged by greedy arms merchants. They were helped by French and Austro-Hungarian revanchism and the feelings of the oppressed small peoples, the Serbian, Irish, Polish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croat etc. The unjust outcome at Versailles in 1919 made the Second World War inevitable. And its injustices in turn made inevitable the collapse of the USSR, the wars in Yugoslavia and now in the Ukraine. Yet, peace could have been arrived at, perhaps in the Tsar’s Hague in 1900, without the needless bloodshed of tens of millions. For the unviable Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires would have collapsed anyway and the other colonial empires, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, German and Belgian, could have dissolved peacefully.

Towards Today’s World

Imperial Russia could have decentralised then, as it did in any case between 1917 and 1991. The world would then inevitably and peacefully have seen what we see today: an economically German-dominated Western Europe, a Russian-dominated North Asia (Eurasia), a Chinese-dominated East Asia, an Indian-dominated South Asia, an Arab-dominated West Asia (‘the Middle East’), and a US-dominated Northern America. In the Global South, Latin America, Africa and Oceania would all have gone their own ways, free of colonial tyranny and ruthless imperialist exploitation. Only because the banks and the arms dealers did not want it, did it not happen then. Just as today in the Ukraine, so then there plenty who did not want peace. However, none of this ‘what if’, suppositional, counterfactual history addresses the real situation today in 2025. How could the problems of the present be resolved, despite the huge errors of the past?

If there is to be peace in Europe, there can be no more Western support for the Fascist regime in Kiev, neither military, nor financial (nor for the Fascist regimes in the Baltics, Scandinavia, Germany, France and the UK). The ‘Ukrainians’ must be freed of the regime that has been massively killing its own men as proxies to die for the USA. Then the Russian Federation would be able to create a new, smaller, but historically-based, and not Soviet-fantasy Ukraine, with the nine provinces of Crimea and the south and east returning to Russia, the four and a half south-western provinces returning to Poland (two and a half provinces), Hungary (one province) and Romania (one province), and the remaining half of the old Soviet Ukraine becoming historic Kievan Rus. That could be its new name with a new flag, as the name ‘Ukraine’ and its flag, Austrian inventions of the century before last, are absurd.

If it created peace, the bankrupt USA could withdraw its forces from all over Europe and close its bases there, and the anachronism of NATO could at last disappear, saving the USA trillions of dollars. It should have disappeared on 25 February 1991, when the Warsaw Pact disappeared. Similarly, if there is to be peace in West Asia, there can be no more US (and UK) support for the Fascist regime in Israel (even if that means that those compromised by the Mossad Epstein, are outed). Israeli Zionism has largely bankrupted the US through the futile wars of the US and its defeats in those wars. Finally, Taiwan would at last be free to return to China, and so Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia could save hundreds of billions of dollars in needless offence (‘defence’) spending. And the USA could withdraw its troops and close its bases there too, saving it hundreds of billions of wasted dollars.

The Russian Church

If there is to be peace in the Church, a new Patriarch would have to be elected in Moscow. This would be he who would restore communion with the Patriarchate Constantinople, except with the invaders under it on Russian canonical territory, and begin talks with the Patriarchate of Alexandria about its jurisdiction in Africa. Then the ball would be in Constantinople’s court to elect a new and at last politically free Patriarch. The full Council of Bishops in Moscow could grant autocephaly to the twelve and a half provinces of Kievan Rus, also allowing the Kievan Church to control its Diaspora. Then it could grant autocephaly to Moldova, in concert with the Romanian Church, in exchange for the return of North Bukovina to Romania, retiring the four discredited Moscow bishops in Moldova, refrocking all those defrocked for political reasons and allowing the Moldovan Church to control its Diaspora.

Autocephaly could also be granted to the Belarusian Church, the Baltic Orthodox Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland) and to the Hungarian Orthodox Church, which would be based on the 600+ parishes of the old Transcarpathia, the province transferred back to Hungary from the Soviet Ukraine. The already Autocephalous Orthodox Church in America (OCA) could at last rename itself OCNA (Orthodox Church of Northern America), in return receiving into itself the forty or so parishes in Northern America at present under Moscow, on condition that Bishop Alexander Belja head the new ‘Kievan and Russian Diocese’ of the OCNA. Moscow should dissolve the anachronistic and largely schismatic Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), with its Russian parishes in the USA and Canada joining the OCNA in two dioceses, of east and west. Those who refused would go off to sects, as usual.

The remaining ROCOR parishes, in Western Europe and Australia, and its few small communities still left in Latin America and the Caribbean, could be handed over to Moscow, as part of three newly Autonomous Metropolias, namely those of Western Europe, Latin America, and Oceania. Internally, Moscow’s Soviet-founded, ecumenist Department of External Relations could be transformed into the Department for Inter-Orthodox Friendship. Bishop-bureaucrats should either become diocesan bishops or else be ‘retired’. There would be no place for ecumenists and ‘cardinal-metropolitans’ in the truly post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church, which should drop the Soviet title of ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ for the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem.’ Finally, discredited bishops should be ‘retired’ and all priests and deacons absurdly defrocked for political reasons since 2022 should be refrocked and restored.

Conclusion: In the Church

As by far the largest Local Church, eight times bigger than the second largest, a de-Sovietised Russian Church has a special responsibility to the other at present fifteen Local Orthodox Churches, not least to a de-CIA-ised Constantinople. Only such actions as the above could help gather together all the other Local Churches in an Inter-Orthodox Council. Here there would be one overriding topic of discussion: the uncanonical Orthodox Diaspora situation, the inevitable resolution to which has been put off for over a century only by politics. The paralysis of the Church from the Soviet age, when Constantinople was used as a Cold War pawn against Russia, and today’s paralysis from the Second Cold War, also launched by the USA, must end. And the Soviet centralisation of the Russian Church must end. There is hope for the future, but only in a Church at last free of both Soviet and CIA mentalities and interference.

4/17 July 2025, The Imperial Martyrs

 

The Defeat of Europe and the Victory of Europeans

‘Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war’.

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare

A Millennium of Attempts to Expand Europe

The fanatical European ruling class still call the barbarian kinglet Charlemagne (748-814) ‘The Father of Europe’. In fact, he was the Destroyer of Europeans, murdering nearly 5,000 Saxons in 782 and trying to cut off North-Western Europe from the Church. This he did with his barbarian heresy against the Holy Spirit, which replaced God with a mere man, and with his proto-Protestant denial that the Holy Spirit can sanctify matter, a heresy known as iconoclasm. Fortunately, his little empire fell after he died and his twin heretical ideology of filioquism and iconoclasm was rejected by Rome.

Unfortunately, his whole ‘European’ construct, or ideology, was later revived. For from the first half of the eleventh century on, the same barbarian Teutons took over the Western Capital in Rome. At once they accelerated their conquest and so their invention of what they came to call Europe, expanding southwards to the Italians, Spanish and Portuguese, northwards to the English, Celts and Scandinavians, and eastwards to the Hungarians, Slavs and Balts. Expansion westwards could only come much later, after the decision to cross the Ocean in order to invade and settle what they eventually called ‘the Americas’.

Thus, by the end of that fatal eleventh century, the expansion of ‘Europe’ had been extended to West Asia and the Holy Land with massacres and genocide. Then it went to North Africa and from the fifteenth century on to the rest of Africa, as well as to East and South Asia, to what is now South and North America, and on to Australasia. Amazingly, one thousand years on, this expansion is still ongoing, in the efforts of today’s Europe to dominate and colonise the ‘borderlands’ of Europe, in the Caucasus, Moldova, Belarus, the Baltics, and above all in the Ukraine.

In the Borderlands

For the word ‘Ukraine’, used in this context first by the Hapsburgs at the end of the nineteenth century, quite literally means ‘borderlands’. It is the same logic of encircling Russia by conquering and controlling its borderlands which they use as battering rams against it. This is why they want to make both the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea into ‘NATO lakes’. These expansionary efforts are pursued through corrupt local elites, with their oligarchs and corrupted puppet politicians. Now they are also trying to surround Russia from the Republics of Central Asia, Iran and Syria, where they have started fatal wars.

Just as the West uses the Ukraine as a battering ram to regime-change Russia, so the USA uses Israel as a battering ram to regime-change Iran and the Taiwan as a battering ram to regime-change China. All these countries, the Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, have to be denazified, for their militant and racist ideology of Nazism promotes their militarisation through aggressive military groupings such as NATO. Just as the Ukraine (NATO) is being demilitarised by Russia which is destroying its arms in the Ukraine, so Iran is demilitarising Israel and China will demilitarise Taiwan. Denazification will follow only after Demilitarisation.

There are even those in that elite who want to expand their ‘Europe’ to Canada! (No surprise, for the European ruling class have already extended their demonic singing competition, ‘Eurovision’, to ‘European’ Israel and Australia! Now the free world has launched ‘Intervision’ to replace Eurovision). ‘Europe’ is nothing to do with the north-western peninsula of Asia, it is not a geographical project, but a purely political project, all about power and money, which always begins by discrediting and demonising others. If you want to understand it, then, as they say in the land of the dollar, ‘Follow the money’.

But Freedom is in the Air

However, freedom is coming. The new Superpower of East Asia and Australasia is China. The Western world has at best only second place there now. In South Asia it is India. In Africa the last colonial power, France, has been kicked out by Russia and China. Will North America free itself? Could the southern part of the United States return to Mexico and Central America? For, beyond that, South America’s greatest trading partner is already China. Now, having lost its proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine, the bipolar Emperor Trump has launched yet another proxy war, this time against Iran, through its agent, Israel.

Once more the Western world has camouflaged its evil aggression behind ‘talks’. In the Ukraine it was by ‘Minsk Agreements’, in the case of Iran, it was by equally insincere American ‘talks’. The Western regime-change operations against both Russia and Iran have failed, both based on vastly underestimating and deliberately despising Russia and Iran. The West came to believe in its own delusional propaganda myths. No-one else did. The Western world has lost. One word, BRICS, has defeated it, even though the attack against Iran was an attack against BRICS, of which Russia, China and Iran are the most important members.

The rout of the Western world is illustrated by its demented leader, Biden, and its narcissistic leader, Trump, and by the political and military pygmy leaders who hold a cocaine party on a train to Kiev, use Ukrainian male prostitutes in London and celebrate their Nazi grandfathers in Brussels. None of these European ‘leaders’ with their pro-war rhetoric has any popularity among their peoples. Having created genocide and slavery for ten long centuries in Europe and then on other continents, culminating in two ‘World Wars’, now the crazy Western elite wants a Third World War. The Western monster must die.

Afterword: Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind

Just now the USA stands on the brink of yet another war. This time it is against Israel’s infamous Pearl Harbour style unprovoked attack against Iran. Iran has no nuclear weapons, is 2-3 years away from having any, and was sitting at the negotiation table where it was already close to agreeing to never having any nuclear weapons. And then the USA, under Israeli pressure, broke off those talks and began to unfold its plan of two decades ago to destroy Iran, as it did Iraq. Libya, Syria etc. Trump’s mental instability has hit a new low, as he supports the genocide of Iranian civilians carried out by Israel with US arms.

As usual, the USA, and its Israeli vassal (though some say that the USA is the vassal of Israel) has totally underestimated the strength of Iran. It is now much more likely that it is Israel that will be regime-changed by Iran, and not Iran by Israel. For Israel is now receiving the same treatment as it has dealt out in Gaza. President Trump has utterly betrayed those who believed his lies that he would put the USA first and stop entering new wars. The only hope now is that either the ultra-erratic Trump can be persuaded to do the opposite of what he seems to want to do, or else that he be certified, removed and replaced.

 

Come, Holy Spirit! Over 5,000 Words on over Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Church

Fifty Years of History; 2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia; The Ukraine; The Suicide of ROCOR; Eastern Papism; A New Local Church

Fifty Years of History

Q: Why is 2025 a significant year for you personally?

A: 2025 marks fifty years of faithfulness to the Orthodox Church and Faith, forty-seven of them in the Russian Church, three in the Romanian Church, and forty years as an Orthodox clergyman.

Q: When did you begin this journey?

A:  My conscious journey began in 1968, when I was twelve years old. I realised then that my destiny was in the Orthodox Church and set about studying Russian, though there had been contacts with two local White Russian families before that. However, as I was under age, I was not able to join the Church until I was eighteen. Six years of waiting. In 1973 I at last managed to visit an Orthodox church. This was the Russian émigré chapel inside the house on the corner of Canterbury Road in Oxford. Soon after, the chapel became a library with the late Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, as the new octagonal University chapel, now Greek, had been opened in the garden outside.

Q: Why did you join the Russian Church?

A: Hobson’s choice, as they say in Cambridge! The only other Local Churches present in this country then, the Greek and the Serbian, would just tell you to go away. ‘You are not one of us’. They were ethnic clubs. Therefore, you had no choice. Only the two Russian jurisdictions would accept you. Not that they were very gracious about it either. They gave you the impression that they would accept you, but they would have preferred not to. Only because the elderly Russian emigres had no political power or money and were dying out, did some of them accept you. Many told us they would sooner die out than accept ‘foreigners’. They also entertained bitter political divisions and polemics, which you just had to put up with and make sense of.

2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia

Q: In 2022 three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England, the so-called ‘Colchester Diocese’, though it stretches to Coventry and Manchester, that is, many ROCOR parishes, 5,000 people and 15 clergy, including three Western rite clergy, left ROCOR and 12 of you (all except for the Western riters) joined the Romanian Church. So do you regret that you had worked for forty-seven years for the unity of the divided three parts of the Russian Church?

A: No, not at all! To work for unity is always good. Without unity Churches fall out of communion and eventually become sects. This is my real experience, I have seen this and lived this. This is what began to happen to the two Russian émigré Churches, the smaller one based in Paris and the larger one based in New York, after the last emigres who had been adults and known the realities of Russia before 1917 had died out and direct contact with reality was lost.

After them, by the early 2000s, the sectarian fantasies, to the left and to the right, in both of them became ever stronger. The Paris group began falling away definitively towards liberal secularism under masonic sponsorship and the New York group began falling away definitively into old calendarist sectarianism under CIA sponsorship, like that of the elderly CIA Colonel Magerovsky. We were eyewitnesses to both and knew all the personalities involved, writing vigorously against both extremist tendencies. There was only one way out for them, to rejoin the broad Centre, which could hold everyone together.

Indeed, we finally got both parts into communion with the Centre in Moscow and so with each other, just in time, with many of the extremists falling away, 47% of the Paris group and 5% of the New York group. However, ironically, our triumph lasted only a little more than one year, for they fell out of communion with each other again. The fault here was entirely that of the very aggressive, old calendarist pharisee-bishops of New York, who had remained in ROCOR or infiltrated it after unity and were wreaking havoc. This took place after set in the dementia of the ever-memorable Metr Hilarion, who had no idea what they were doing in his name. The schism came in December 2020. Only one bishop resisted, the anti-sectarian and anti-rebaptiser Archbishop Peter of Chicago, who had been an altar boy to St John, but who has since died. His see is now without a permanent bishop and many there are now out of control.

Q: Why did the Centre in Moscow not try and hold the two émigré parts together?

A: As the Russians say of themselves, ‘We are slow to harness, but quick to ride’. In other words, Moscow is very passive, it does nothing for, say, twenty years despite all the warnings of the coming explosion from the grassroots, and then, too late, after the explosion, it overreacts to the extreme. This is the result of not working incrementally and being pastorally interested, only politically interested. Firstly, Moscow had, and refused to have, little or any understanding of the provincial Russian emigration and its petty political arguments. Secondly, Moscow was distracted from pastoral care by international politics, for by that time Moscow had itself fallen out of communion with the Greeks, after the grossly uncanonical actions of the Greeks in the Ukraine, breaking the first canons of the Apostles. Again, here too, Moscow overreacted.

Here we see how the fall from communion with the Greeks by the Centre affected the rest. Lack of communion is like an infection, a virus. So all our work for unity was undone by the Moscow error of overreaction to the Greek error, splitting off from the Church. Then, not having turned the other cheek, Moscow ‘did a Constantinople’, by interfering in the jurisdiction of Alexandria in Africa. Little wonder that people then began to say that ‘Moscow is as bad as Constantinople’.

Q: What do you do, if even the Centre is infected by the spirit of disunity and without principles tolerates sectarianism, and ignores schism and even the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox?

A: In such a case, you must transfer to a canonical Local Church which is not infected with the disease of schism and has a Diaspora structure. Today, that means neither the Russians, nor the Greeks. As I had been to seminary in the 1970s and a couple of the seminarians had become bishops, namely in the Serbian and Romanian Churches, and since I had been around for a long time and had met lots of other bishops since then and many had read the translations of my writings into Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, German and Czech, we had a choice of where to go. After the Russian betrayal of us in the Non-schismatic Diaspora, all the others offered to protect us from the new, brutal, sectarian, uncanonical and anti-pastoral ROCOR. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The Ukraine

Q: What was the connection between your departure for the Romanian Patriarchate and the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: None, directly. We were received by our old friend, the very experienced Metr Joseph (Pop) of the four-million strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022, as proved by the documents issued on that day (despite the blatant lies of others on the internet who said that those documents were forged (!), much to the shock of Metr Joseph – he did not know that bishops can lie). Now that was eight days before the new phase of the Ukrainian conflict began on 24 February.

It was providential that we had left before that conflict, because then we did not have to face the deep and bitter divisions among the flock which the commemoration of Patriarch Kyrill has brought to all Russian parishes, especially in ROCOR, though it happens even inside Russia. There anti-war Orthodox are also boycotting the Church in very large numbers, not least after the ‘defrocking’ and exiling of liberal but popular priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky.

The reason why we left was the schism which occurred with the official introduction of the heresy of rebaptism of Orthodox under old calendarist pressure, not the problem of the Ukraine. Our departure was clearly not directly connected with the intensified conflict in the Ukraine eight days later, on 24 February, but there was still an indirect connection. This is because both the heresy of rebaptism and the scandalous support for a war against other Orthodox were caused by exactly the same lack of pastoral leadership. The chasm between the bishops on the one hand and the suffering priests and people on the other hand, whom the bishops have been persecuting, opened up for exactly the same reason.

Q: But you seem to support the Russian side in the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: Not at all, that is not true. No clergyman can support war and violence. However, as a political observer and cultural historian, who knows very well both Russia and the Ukraine, both officially and unofficially, and has met both recent Patriarchs and President Putin, and who also perfectly well knows the aggression and hypocrisy of the West, several things were obvious.

Firstly, it was obvious from the very outset that, as a Great Power, Russia would win that deeply tragic and catastrophic conflict. That is not support, it is just a recognition of an obvious fact. It was also clear that the Kiev regime was Fascist and atheist and was acting simply as a proxy of the highly aggressive USA and the EU. It was obvious that the anti-Ukrainian regime in Kiev existed only because NATO was using it to try and destroy Russia and grab its wealth, for the Ukraine is the last chance of the West to dominate the world and pay off its colossal debts. It was also plain for all to see that the Kiev regime had been persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all the minorities there (and the Russians in the Ukraine are a minority of 40%!) for years. Blood is on their hands – the Russians did not start this.

Moreover, the CIA and Constantinople support for the fake Church, the OCU, under Dumenko, is an abuse of the canons, on the same level as the abuse of the canons by others, as is the present ‘defrocking’ of bishops of Cyprus for their faithfulness to Christ in refusing to recognise the fake Church. The latter has totally discredited the Church of Cyprus, which kowtows to discredited Constantinople and the local US ambassador. Frankly, there is something quite satanic in the Kiev regime, as it closes hundreds of churches, threatens to turn them into casinos and propagandises LGBT.

It was also obvious that the Ukrainian people, especially the real Orthodox there, were the victims of that war. And finally, it was manifest that the ignorant and arrogant Western mainstream media, financed by the CIA and MI6, which are themselves financed by the Military Financial Complex of the USA and the UK, supported the Kiev Nazis because they could make a lot of money out of such a conflict. They told plain lies. It was the same in Britain in the First World War, where the newspapers which were owned by millionaire arms merchants told the same type of lies.

The Suicide of ROCOR

Q: How did ROCOR come to discredit and destroy itself?

A: All too many in the Russian episcopate now appear to want to suck money out of the parishes in order to finance their ‘superior’, oligarchic lifestyle and then in return sadistically punish the selfsame priests and parishes for telling the truth and living as Christians, also trying to destroy their families. Such bishops, whether inside or outside Russia, claim that they are acting according to the canons and that any who refuse to accept their vicious persecutions and slanders are committing the ultimate sin of refusing to participate in their evil. That apparently is ‘uncanonical’!

Clearly, these people are not Christians. It would be laughable if it were not so sad. We are obedient to Christ, not to those who are de facto filioquists, that is, who claim to have replaced Christ and so put their clearly twisted interpretations of the canons above the Holy Spirit. Their lust for power and money is what has temporarily corrupted the Russian Church, just as it has Constantinople. The Russian émigré Churches had never suffered from that disease, as they had neither power, nor money, which was precisely their glory, but they had died out by the early 2000s. We saw their last generation between 1975 and 2000.

The local example of a recent convert was of one who suffered from narcissistic rages and tantrums, throwing his toys out of his pram and acting as a typical unprincipled bully. Uneducated and ignorant, humiliating those who had been in the Church before he was even born, he threatened all with a metaphorical baseball bat. He was a kind of ecclesiastical Trump, wanting only to ‘grab property’ (the words of our outraged solicitor who examined his shameless claims in astonishment – she had never seen anything like it, even in the secular world) and dominate, without any understanding of local languages, history, geography, customs etc. Moscow now knows all about him, since the scandal he caused in the altar of a church in Paris last year, when he had to be restrained by another bishop from his aggressive rage and threat of violence.

Q: Was ROCOR’s entry into schism and even heresy inevitable?

A: No, not at all. As far back as 1997, a friend of mine, the late Fr Roman Lukianov in Boston USA, warned that ROCOR risked becoming a sect, as the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, successor of St John, had reposed in 1993. For decades Vladyka Antony had been the great moderating influence inside ROCOR against the American crazies. He was rightly concerned, as were others of us.

I remember one old aristocratic émigré in London, who had worked for MI6 (so many of them did) in Iran in the 1950s (himself he just said that he had worked for ‘The Foreign Office’, which was well-understood code). He said that no unity between ROCOR and the MP was possible because ROCOR was like a glass of pure water and the MP was like a glass of dirty water. I asked him then why St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of the Crimea had been in the MP? Then I asked him why were there so many scandals in ROCOR, with the Grabbe affair, his ‘six million dollar’ son, and the defrocking for good canonical reasons of immoral priests and why there were so many ROCOR parishes that did not have priests? He simply answered that he had never heard of any of that! In other words, it was all ignorance and bigotry. It was the usual phariseeism of those who see the speck in others, but not the log in their own eye.

In fact, despite such people, ROCOR did not become a sect and ten years later it even entered back into communion with Moscow, then presided over by a former émigré, the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II. That was a miracle. I witnessed it. ROCOR through the ever-memorable Metr Laurus had received the most generous canonical agreement from the Patriarch, becoming a self-governing part of the Russian Church. ROCOR had basically become an Autonomous Church of the Diaspora. This had been exactly our hope all along. My only regret was that it had taken so long. Patriarch Alexis, whom I knew, had already made the same offer in about 1995! Seven years had been wasted after the revolutionary 2000 Jubilee Council in Moscow when all our just demands had been met.

With such an agreement to autonomy, ROCOR could therefore have avoided all the controversy of the later Russian schism with the Greeks and the conflict in the Ukraine and not broken communion with but co-operated with the other Local Churches. (By other Local Churches, I do not include the leadership of the Greek Churches, whose policies were purely political, dictated to them and paid for by the CIA).

But instead of using its autonomy and working with the concert of the politically free Local Churches, self-governing ROCOR showed no independence from Moscow at all, except to express CIA views of the Kiev regime! It not only entered into schism from the Greeks, but also took several priests from the Greek Church without letters of release, and accepted in silence the persecution of priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky. All this was because it did not want to recognise the Catholicity of the Church, but to be a schismatic ghetto-group, actually denying the sacraments of other local Churches, against its own people.

Q: But you must admit that ROCOR had long been a breeding ground for schism?

A: Yes, there had been the Bostonite old calendarist schism in, I think, 1986, when about 2,000 left, the tiny old calendarist schisms in France in 1987 and 2001, then the four schisms in the USA and England of 2007. But each time the numbers who left for all these various warring ‘True Orthodox’ sects were minute, often fewer than 500, sometimes as few as 50. The ROCOR Centre had remained firm.

And all those schisms proved just how necessary it was for ROCOR to enter into canonical communion with Moscow and to eliminate the sectarian spirit of hatred and division for ever. Those schisms also proved how ROCOR had for years been attracting the wrong sort of people, pathological extremists and the dissatisfied, sometimes second-generation immigrant Russians with their inferiority complexes and fantasies about pre-Revolutionary Russia, sometimes weird converts from Protestant sects, very often with sexual problems.

These are the sort of people who call normal Orthodox ‘World Orthodox’ and themselves, in their narcissistic and pharisaical pride, ‘True Orthodox’. There is no such thing as ‘World Orthodox’. True, there can be worldly or lapsed Orthodox, but they do not go to church and therefore, they are not Orthodox. An Orthodox is one who goes to church, unlike so many of the internet Orthodox who dare to call themselves ‘True Orthodox’. The only ‘True Orthodox’ are the saints of God, to whose state all Orthodox aspire.

Today, there are all of us who left ROCOR from 2021 on, in the USA, in England and elsewhere. Only this time we left not for weird and schismatic sectarian groups, but for the mainstream Local Churches, anti-Bartholomew Constantinople (those who joined Constantinople in the USA and Paris refuse to have anything to do with his fake Ukrainian Church) and then Bucharest, which welcomed us all with open arms and great sympathy, as heroic witnesses and refugees from ROCOR schism and heresy.

This time it was the scandal-ridden ROCOR itself which had become a weird and schismatic sectarian group. True, there were others in ROCOR who were too weak and fearful, including one bishop and several clergy, who did not leave for other Local Churches, but simply gave up and resigned in disgust at the lack of canonicity and corruption they had seen inside the new ROCOR. This is the end of ROCOR, its suicide. It has outlived its sell-by date.

Q: But what do you think about the anti-Moscow Patriarchate ROCOR Synod statement of 5 June?

https://www.synod.com/synod/eng2025/20250605_ensynodstatement.html

A: This was a clearly provoked by the very recent Sister Vassa debacle and the numbers of Russians leaving ROCOR in the USA and withdrawing their donations, since the documents contains nothing new and could have been written years ago. (Why wasn’t it written then? Well, as American say, ‘Follow the money’). It was clearly written by the German Metr Mark and his entourage, who have been running the Synod ever since they removed Metr Vitaly in 2001.

It is a document that deals only with the past of 70-90 years ago and fails utterly to address the present, the elephant in the room, the war in the Ukraine. The liberals will rightly mock the document as too little, too late. However, there is even worse.

From the Moscow viewpoint, the ROCOR document is scandalous. It is well known that the German Diocese of Metr Mark still has many children and grandchildren of Vlasovites (Russians who fought with Hitler) in it. For Russians in Russia Stalin was the victor of 1945, just as for British people Churchill (who was just as racist as Hitler) was the victor in 1945. And Vlasov was a traitor. Any attack of this manner on Stalin is seen as Nazi and therefore as support for the Nazis in Kiev, who are have been killing Russian civilians and children ever since 2014, with the support of the grandchildren of Nazis in Berlin and Brussels.

This statement has quite rightly outraged Moscow, especially since it has Vlasovite and CIA connections. It was 27 million Soviet citizens who were massacred by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945. Victory came when Stalin was the Soviet leader. Why is ROCOR, with its close Vlasov and CIA connections meddling in internal affairs in Russia? If Moscow ditches ROCOR, then it will lose its last shreds of a claim to canonicity and become officially the schismatic sect that it already is. For the quite correct Russian reaction, see:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2025/06/06/sinod_rpcz_nastupaet_na_te_zhe_grabli

Q: Today ROCOR is attracting many young men. So ROCOR is not finished?

A: All Orthodox dioceses in the Diaspora are receiving many young people today. This is due to the internet effect of various influencers. But we have to be very careful and receive only the serious, not the beardy-weirdy. With such people the lapse rate is extremely high. I am now receiving at least one young person a month, though as many young women as men, including refugees from ROCOR sectarianism, now that they have understood their mistake. ROCOR is once more attracting the wrong sort of young men, the terminally online, the exclusivists, incels, woman-haters, closet homosexuals, bisexuals, extremists, narcissists, internet Orthodox. You cannot build a Church on their exclusivist pathology and hatred, and yet ROCOR usually ordains such young men, preferring them to the normal!

Thus, they claim that Orthodoxy is ’manly’ and ‘masculine’. But what about women? Are they not allowed? Why are they against family life and children? Clearly, all this is internet fantasy. Russian churches especially have always been filled with women, 80% or 90%. But you will not learn about that reality from the internet. Those remaining in ROCOR just never learn. They are just making it worse for themselves. All we can do is to pray for their repentance despite their schism and heresy.

Eastern Papism

Q: Why did some Russian hierarchs fall into exactly the same error as the Greek (Constantinople) Church before it, by proclaiming themselves to be some sort of Eastern Papacy?

A: Only about 2% of Orthodox belong to the Greek jurisdiction of Constantinople, whereas 70% (140 million) belong to that of Moscow. Moscow therefore thinks that it is No 1. However, Constantinople maintains that as the Church of the former Imperial Capital (which fell nearly 600 years ago!), it is the ‘first without equals’, that is, No 1.

Now promoting yourself as ‘No 1’ is precisely the heresy of Papism, which directly contradicts the Gospel, where Christ calls on us to serve others, not to lord it over others. The First Rome fell because it wanted to dominate. Those who call themselves the Second Rome and the Third Rome have learned nothing from its fall and have instead chosen to imitate that exact same ‘Roman’ fall. It is the sin of Rome-ism, even though you may call it worldliness, secularism, erastianism or Sergianism.

Fortunately, the Church works through Catholicity, not through becoming a State (the First Rome), ancient prestige (the Second Rome) or through size (the Third Rome). A Council of the whole Church, all sixteen Local Churches, is the solution to this childish division. In any case, as a result, both Moscow and Constantinople have punished themselves. Today Moscow is being reduced in size, losing a third of its territories and parishes, and as for Constantinople, it is losing the last shreds of its prestige, making itself into a laughing-stock, as one bishop after another in the Church of Cyprus is ‘defrocked’ for the ‘heresy’ of disagreeing with Constantinople!

Both Moscow and Constantinople are punished by the sin that they sinned with, as the Book of Proverbs says. God is not mocked. Meanwhile the real Church, the other fourteen Local Churches, goes on together with the many healthy elements within both Moscow and Constantinople are in accord. This is not a sickness unto death, for repentance is possible.

A New Local Church

Q: What after fifty years of struggle do you think of the chances of a new Local Church being established?

A: I have always believed that I would not live to see it, but I have always fought for it, for the sake of our children and grandchildren. It is still for the future and despite the present Greek and Russian squabble we are far closer to it than fifty years ago, when it was an impossible dream and even services in local languages hardly existed. The present schism does not fill me with pessimism because people in their eighties die. What is frightening is that people of that age appear to feel no repentance.

The point is that over the last fifty years I have seen both the Russian Church in the Diaspora and the Greek (Constantinople) Church dying out. Why? Because they stuck to what for the new Western-born generations of Russians and Greeks were foreign languages, Slavonic and Greek. They do not understand a word of them. The decision not to use local languages was suicide, the ethnic funeral of the Church.

On top of that, what possible missionary witness do you give to Non-Orthodox, if you do not even speak the local language and understand the local culture? Did the Apostles go around speaking in a foreign language to preach the Gospel? No, they spoke in the local language. This is one of the meanings of Pentecost. To speak in tongues does not mean to speak in gibberish in a wave of hysterical self-exaltation, like crazy Evangelicals and Pentecostalists. It means to work in order to learn another language, its culture and customs, in order to inculturate the Orthodox Christian Faith and so bring people to Christ.

St Nicholas of Japan, St Tikhon of Moscow and St John of Shanghai are recent examples, for they did exactly this. They did not impose, they set examples. All we have to do is follow them. For instance, when Japan started its proxy war against Russia with its undeclared surprise attack on Russia, St Nicholas told his Japanese clergy to pray for their armed forces and locked himself away to pray for the duration. Here is our example.

Q: And what about the chances of achieving an Autocephalous Local Church today?

A: Firstly, most Local Churches do not even have a Diaspora jurisdiction, so they are not concerned by the question.

Secondly, many of the Churches that do have a Diaspora jurisdiction would never give autocephaly to their Diaspora jurisdiction for ethnic reasons, especially if that jurisdiction is small. So there is no hope that in Western Europe, for example, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian or Antiochian Churches will ever grant autocephaly. This means that only the big three, the Greek, Russian or Romanian Churches could ever give autocephaly in Western Europe. True, the Romanian Church gave autonomy several years ago, but not autocephaly for very good canonical reasons, for which see below.

Thirdly, there is the question of local people who have joined that Church. This is all about missionary work. Ghetto-churches will never give autocephaly. Why should they? They are precisely not local and do not want to be local! But if there were large numbers of local people in a Church, then it would have to receive autocephaly. This so far is not the case anywhere, the numbers of native people accepting Orthodoxy have been very small.

Fourthly, there is the question of size. For example, the Greek Church is by far the largest in North America and Australia, the Antiochian the largest in South America, whereas the Romanian Church has in the last 15 years become by far the largest in Western Europe. In those regions, we must hope that the largest group would take responsibility and draw towards autocephaly. However, more of this in the final point below.

Finally, there is the issue of ability to get on with others, i.e, the absence of nationalism and narrow jurisdictionalism and even worse, of sectarianism. This disqualifies the Greek and now the Russian Churches, one of whose bishops told our Romanians and Moldovans that, ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. This is racism, chauvinism on the same level as Constantinople’s.

The fact is that the Greek Church of Constantinople has never voluntarily given or recognised genuine autocephaly to anyone because of its centralising tendencies, neither to the Serbs, nor to the Russians, nor to the Romanians and, most obviously, nor to the Bulgarians, nor to the Poles, nor to the Czechs and Slovaks, nor to the Macedonians today. Even the ‘autocephaly’ the Greeks recently gave to the Ukrainian schismatics is completely fake. Their fake Church of gangsters and thugs has no independence and depends entirely on CIA cash. Even in history, when the Copts and the Armenians broke away from Orthodoxy, the main reason was their nationalist reaction to Greek racism.

With the suicide of ROCOR and its schism from the Paris Archdiocese of the Russian Church, in Western Europe the Russians have now done exactly the same thing as the Greeks, excluding most Ukrainians, Moldovans and normal local Western Europeans from the Russian Church, that is, becoming like the Greeks a nationalistic ghetto-Church. There is only one option left – the Romanians.

Are the Romanians up to the job? I can affirm that many are, the publishing efforts in English and French of the Romanian Dioceses are formidable. But is that enough? Only time will tell. What is certain that no one Local Church can give autocephaly. It must be done in concert, which is why Bucharest did not give us autocephaly, only autonomy. Thus, there is no room either for nationalism, nor sectarianism.

Q: What might a new Local Church look like?

A: I see it as a group of bishops, with their flocks of different nationalities, presiding in turn for a fixed term over the new Local Church, its autocephaly granted collectively by all the Local Churches concerned. Each bishop would have his own diocese, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Russian and Antiochian. We must avoid the error of the Greeks who set up episcopal assemblies. These failed and no longer operate because the Greeks wanted to dominate them and sat in permanent control over them, heavy-handedly trying to impose their views. That is not the way to go. There must be complete respect and freedom for different languages, calendars and customs, not to mention different attitudes towards ecumenism. There must be no interference from the Mother-Churches. Autocephaly must mean autocephaly. There is no other way.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Pentecost 2025

 

 

 

 

The Consequences of the Russian Victory in the Ukraine

The Origin of the Western Delusion

The elites of Western European countries have always tried to invade and then colonise and exploit the lands nearest to them. This means the invasions, mainly from the lands between the Rhine and the Loire or else from Northern Italy, of Sardinia in 1015-17, then of Greek Sicily and Southern Italy, the Frankish-led 1064 Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, the Norman-led invasion of England in 1066 and from there the invasions of the Celtic lands, the Frankish ‘Crusades’ in the Holy Land and the Teutonic Knight invasions of the Baltic States and Russia. These aggressions against Russia were later repeated in every century, by the Poles in 1609-18, by the Swedes in the Great Northern War, by Napoleon in 1812 and then by Hitler in 1941, both with Collective European invasions, which became routs of Western Europe. Now history is repeated in the Ukraine.

Originally, such imperialism came about because Western Europe began to consider that it possessed a superior religion under its leader, the infallible Pope, who had by dogma replaced Christ and from whom alone the Holy Spirit comes into the world. Then it laid claim to a superior civilisation, because it had superior military and industrial technology. Next it claimed to be a superior race (most visibly among the ‘Aryan’ Nazis), and today it considers that it is superior because it has ‘liberal’ values. In fact, like all its other ‘European values’, its liberalism is Fascist, as it denigrates others. Among them, even the word ‘liberal’ has come to mean intolerant. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the grandfathers of many of the unelected, but ‘infallible’, ‘Papist’ and Neo-Carolingian EU leaders were Nazis, for example those of von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Baerbok etc.

The End-Game in the Ukraine

The ill-advised Trump has lost the US proxy war against Russia, whatever the PR drone stunts of Kiev. Ignorant of the geography, history and politics of all countries outside the USA, he believed the propaganda lies which were fed to him, that Russia was losing the war with huge losses and sacrificing ‘human waves’ of its soldiers, its leader was dying, its ‘tiny economy’ (‘the same size as Spain’s’) was ‘in meltdown’, its forces had no arms, no fuel, no weapons, no soldiers, that it ‘was a gas station masquerading as a country’. Trump may be a poker player, but he has ‘no cards’, so he cannot win. He has and never had any ‘leverage’ and the latest EU threats of piracy are laughable. Russia’s economy is in fact the fourth largest in the world, at least four to five times larger than Spain’s, indeed, the largest in Europe. Perhaps slowly, but reality is dawning.

Russia is not a poker player, but a chess player. Thus, in the Ukraine there will be no frozen conflict, no stalemate, no ceasefire, no DMZ, as there was in Korea, in that war which the Western world also lost. No, the Ukraine will be another Vietnam or Afghanistan, a humiliating capitulation, as in Saigon or Kabul. Millions of Ukrainians who had to flee to Russia from the genocidal Fascist regime in Kiev will return to the New Ukraine, once peace has come there, as well as many of the more than six million Ukrainians who took the politically-motivated bribes of the West and emigrated there after 2022. When peace comes, there will be a New Ukraine and it will be remade as a neutral State, with very deep suspicion of the West which wanted to genocide the Ukraine ‘to the last Ukrainian’, for clearly Ukrainian lives do not matter to the racist and anti-Slav Western world.

The conflict in the Ukraine has been a civil war and also a war of attrition. The Russian aim from the outset was to wipe out the NATO-trained, -armed and -financed Ukrainian armed forces. This is what Russia meant by ‘Demilitarisation’. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, needs no new territories, but the ‘Ukrainian’ territories inhabited by persecuted Russians will become part of Russia. Trump is no mediator in this conflict, the USA has always supported Kiev in every way and is still doing so, so his PR peace efforts to try and win a Nobel prize, funded by the CIA, are all in vain. The war will end on the battlefield. All wars of attrition end suddenly. This one will end suddenly too and that end may come in the next few months. In that case the conflict will have lasted about as long as the Second World War in Russia (June 1941-May 1945).

Consequences: A World of Spheres of Influence

Given NATO aggression, which caused the war in the Ukraine through its sponsorship of the puppet Fascist regime that it set up in Kiev, and the imminent NATO defeat, there will be great bitterness and a spirit of revanchism against Russia in defeated and humiliated Western Europe. We can imagine a barbed wire fence being laid out along the border between the New Ukraine and the Uniat Galician far west of Stalin’s old Ukraine, which will be separated from the Russian world by that fence. This will prevent invasions and terrorist attacks, perhaps planned, as so often happens, by the British MI6 and SAS, from Galicia or Poland. This situation will last until such time as there is a new pragmatic and realistic elite in Western Europe, the old ideological one swept away by its long-suffering peoples, who want good relations with their neighbours.

The post-Ukrainian world will be a multipolar world of spheres of influence, dominated by the three Great Powers and perhaps later by a fourth, India, if it can overcome its narrow Hindu nationalism. Thus, the USA will dominate or control Greenland (to be invaded by it), Canada (seceded Alberta may well become the 51st State of the USA), Mexico, Central America as far as Panama, the ‘Gulf of America’ and the Caribbean. China will dominate East Asia and its influence will become ever greater in Japan, Korea, South-East Asia, the Western outpost of Australia, South America (which the US is about to lose to China) and, together with Russian arms and diplomacy, Africa. Russia will help all Northern Asia, from Europe to the Sea of Japan, including the Caucasus and Central Asia and any in Western Europe (see below) who wish for co-operation.

Consequences: An Isolated Western Europe

Now Europe has for a millennium been divided into two halves. The Western half (‘Western Europe’ – see above) consists of the former Catholic and Protestant countries. The Eastern half belongs to Eurasia and consists of Russia, Belarus and the future New Ukraine, whose precise borders are yet to be set. Western Europe is sociologically and ideologically divided between the tiny bankster- and oligarch-controlled ruling elite, supported by and consisting of some 20% of the population who benefit from the elite, 20% who oppose the feudal, oligarchic and exploitative nature of the West and then the 60% inbetween. This 60% swims with the tide, looking only for its own survival and benefit. Nobody can rely on the support of this unprincipled mass. However, we do not condemn them, they too have to eat and feed their children.

The tragedy of Western Europe is that its elite has actually believed in its own lies, known variously as ‘propaganda, spin, narrative, fantasy, fairy tales, wishful thinking, virtual reality, a parallel universe’. All of these such fantasies are delusion, more precisely self-delusion. The result is that Western Europe will be defeated and then will separate from its artificial ‘Union’ into its various constituent parts, north, west, east and south. For example, the sixteen countries of south-eastern Europe, from Austria to Cyprus, could leave for the sphere of influence of Russia, with all Northern Eurasia, linking them with the New Silk Road of China. Many in Hungary, Slovakia and Non-EU Serbia are already thinking of doing this. This will leave the twenty-five countries of the rest of Western Europe even more abandoned and isolated.

They will have to define themselves afresh, retrieving their roots. It will then be quite possible that the six countries of south-western Europe, Italy, Malta, San Marino and then Spain, Portugal and Andorra will leave the EU, in that order, to join south-western Europe and the BRICS world led by the Russian Federation. This will leave the nineteen countries of north-western Europe, from Iceland to Estonia, even more isolated. Only through such isolation and self-examination can come repentance and the decolonisation and devassalisation of the Western European peoples, the French, Bavarians, English, Poles, Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavians, Finns, Balts and all the others, from their corrupted and barbarian Neo-Carolingian elite, which today is centred in Brussels. For some, like the long-oppressed Irish, this repentance will be easier than for others.

The Consequences for the Russian Orthodox Church

By allying itself with the State of the Russian Federation, the Sovietised and nationalistic Moscow Patriarchate (and its New York ROCOR satellite) have lost their influence outside the Federation, in the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic States, just as it lost the Orthodox in Finland, Poland and Slovakia after the 1917 Revolution, when those countries were recreated. In other words, a bureaucratised, clericalised, nationalised and militarised ideology replaced pastorship in the Russian Church. In bitterness Western countries may yet ban any Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe. This is already happening in the Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia and its Patriarch has already been officially banned from the Ukraine, Lithuania, Canada and the UK. It is becoming a ghetto-Church, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

The problems of the Patriarchate of Moscow and its ROCOR subsidiary all came about through the desire of certain of its leading bishops to create an Orthodox Vatican. They have long admired the Statist ideology of the Vatican, espoused by Patriarch Sergius. This meant competing against Constantinople, which had already advanced much further along that same Statist path, that of replacing pastors with political ideologues, replacing Churchmanship with politics. The Vatican is a Church-Business, a Church-State, a Church of the filioque, according to which the Pope is the Head of the Church, replacing Christ, from Whom ‘proceeds the Holy Spirit’ and who has the right to persecute real Christians. But the real Church of God, Orthodoxy, is not a State, not a Business, not the filioque. The elitist Vatican model is alien and rejected by all sincere Orthodox.

 

 

The Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine, the Russian Federation and the Émigré Church

Introduction: National Demons

Just like every person, so every country also has its demons. France has its absurd narcissistic vanity (Louis XIV, Napoleon, Mitterrand, Macron), Britain has its overweening delusional arrogance (Churchill, Thatcher), surrounded Germany has its crazed bouts of bipolarity (Kaiser Wilhem, Hitler), the USA has its freakish urge for global domination (Clinton and Biden), and Russia has its fits of suicide, heightened by the host of totalitarian demons of its great suicide from 1917 on, when even the name ‘Russia’ disappeared until Hitler restored it.

On the other hand, the Ukraine has its ever-grasping and outrageous sense of entitlement, heightened by the injustices of Soviet persecutions, especially of the territory Stalin stole from Poland, directed from Moscow from 1939 on. Tragically, these old demons of the post-Soviet and atheised Ukraine and of the post-Soviet and atheised Russian Federation brought the two countries to war with each other in 2014. That war worsened in February 2022, after the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime had refused peace talks for eight years.

The Atheist Tragedy in the Ukraine

The demons love and laugh at human bloodshed and suffering, which they create, and have especially been mocking fallen Orthodox since 1917, toying with the Church of God through the passions of certain bishops of various nationalities. The demons gloat at human misery and the despairing souls they capture as a result. And the demons continue to mock today. The conflict in the Ukraine is a geopolitical struggle which pits US-led Globalism, parasitically feeding off Ukrainian nationalism, against Russian-led Nationalism.

The latter treats all Non-Russians as second-class citizens. The conflict in the Ukraine is catastrophic, for it is a civil war, a war between former brothers. It was made possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith, the result of the demons that entered the Russian Empire in 1917 and which have still not been exorcised. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. Now the tragic conflict in the Ukraine is in its fourth, probably final, year. Over 1.2 million Ukrainian soldiers and 100,000 Russian soldiers are dead.

Communists and Nationalists

The three Russian aims were stated very clearly from the very outset, as the Liberation from Neo-Nazi Kiev of the purely Russian Donbass in eastern Ukraine (still not achieved after over three years, though this aim has had to be extended to other provinces), and the Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine. After all, the war was caused by the categorical refusal of the Nazi Kiev puppet regime, installed by frightening violence in 2014 against the democratically-elected government, to allow the Federalisation of the multiethnic Ukraine.

Instead, the regime imposed a centralised NATO system, just like that of the Communists before it. They no longer call themselves Communists, but instead Nationalists, but spiritually those are still Communists. Clearly, as a result of that refusal to decentralise, the Ukraine would fragment and fall apart, as is always the result of Stalinist centralisation, whether in the Ukraine or in the Russian Federation. There the new militaristic and clericalist trend of erecting statues of Stalin is growing, a clear sign of its reviving nationalist centralisation.

The Atheist Tragedy in ROCOR

The situation in the Ukraine is mirrored in other Stalinist-style centralising organisations all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and even outside it, in, for example, in the Russian Church and even in its New-York based émigré fragment, the so-called Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). It is known as the American Synod, for today it is Russian only in history and name. In reality, its main language is American English, and its ideology is right-wing Protestant Americanism, a Disneyfied Russian Orthodox fairy-tale.

With large chunks of hellfire Lutheranism of the convert type thrown in, this ideology is appropriate for ‘the Republican Party at prayer’, but not for the Orthodox Church. The old ROCOR of Russian emigres has been substituted by the new ROCOR, a process which can be dated back to its internal coup d’etat, which took place approximately in 2017. In the case of the new ROCOR too, Orthodox aims should be Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification. For like the Kiev regime, it too has replaced Faith with a political ideology.

Liberation in the USA and England

First of all, there must be liberation from the ‘Persecuting ROCOR’, the mentality of pharisaic sectarianisation, which led directly to its schism from the fullness of the Russian Church as well as from the rest of the Orthodox Church, and its rejection of the Local Orthodox Churches, which ended in a ghetto of self-isolation and the Donatist heresy of rebaptism. This we have seen in the USA, with the escape from ROCOR of Fr Alexander Belya, who is now in charge of a Vicariate of over twenty Slav clergy and parishes in the Greek Archdiocese.

That situation was mirrored in England with the planned escape of over 90% of the ROCOR diocese to the Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox Church, since well over three-quarters of its 5,000 parishioners were Romanians and Moldovans. It was there received without hesitation on 16 February 2022. The fake Russian nationalism of the new ROCOR (fake because it is in fact American!), its insatiable greed for money, its heresy of rebaptism, its hatred for all Orthodox of the Tradition and outright, shameless lies, define the new American ROCOR.

Liberation Elsewhere

There are also the many clergy and people who have left ROCOR in France and Germany, profoundly unhappy with the anti-Russian, American mentality of the new ROCOR. That unhappiness is almost certain to spread throughout the remaining ROCOR parishes in Western Europe over the next few years, as the clergy and people refuse to become Americans. Now there is also the sad case of Sister Vassa Larina, herself an American-Russian, but in Europe, who rejected the new arch-Republican American Synod, which she calls ‘disgraceful’.

However, rather than returning to the Tradition of the old ROCOR of her father (whom I knew well), she made the strange choice of a liberal ideology, leaving ROCOR for the schismatic Ukrainian nationalist sect, known as ‘The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU). Instead of simply letting her go to such liberals, whom she has always so admired as a liberal feminist academic, the American Synod punished her. In all these cases, it is freedom and respect for other opinions that are missing in the new ROCOR – just as it is in the former USSR.

Demilitarisation and Denazification

The best of the old ROCOR was always politically neutral, not partisan. Now we have ROCOR bishops who are openly anti-Russian, pro-NATO, or belong to the CIA or work for its anti-Orthodox front organisations. True, this process began in the 1960s with the then Fr George Grabbe, but he was a one-off. The new ROCOR explains the decision of the American Synod to get rid of all those of the Tradition, who knew the old Russian clergy and laity born before the Revolution or in the two first generations of the emigration between 1917 and 1967.

They are being replaced with new and idealistic converts, who do not know the Tradition, do not speak Russian, and have little to do with the realities, both positive and negative, of the Church inside Russia today. They can therefore be easily manipulated with fairy-tales and myths of ‘Holy Rus’. As for Nazification in ROCOR, that began in Germany in the 1930s and continued with its support of the Russian Nazis under Vlasov. The survivors of Stalin’s barbarism emigrated to the USA and South America, especially to Argentina, after 1945.

In the New ROCOR

However, they were opposed by the old pre-Revolutionary Western European ROCOR and the Chinese-Australian ROCOR, as well as the minority who had kept the authentic Orthodox Tradition in North America. After the Second World War Nazification was tempered to some extent, but from time to time its authoritarianism came to the fore again. Since the takeover of the old ROCOR by the American Synod in 2017, it has deliberately sent out its new convert-bishops to Australia and Western Europe to entirely dismantle the old ROCOR.

Thus, they tried to retire or force out faithful clergy and people. This substitution is now all but complete. Implementing schism from the Russian Orthodox Church, it has now begun rebaptising other Orthodox, denigrating other Local Churches and telling public and private lies about them, for ‘ROCOR is the only True Church’. This OneTrueChurch Protestantisation has made the American Synod into a sect, which refuses to concelebrate with other Orthodox, except in rare cases where it has self-interest to do so, to try and show that it is not a sect.

Conclusion: Waiting for Repentance

We will continue to pray for them and wait for their repentance, in the hope that they will return to the legacy of the old ROCOR of St John of Shanghai. Their ancestors suspended him and put him on trial, but like the Righteous Job he was in the end justified and glorified by God. Perhaps once this nightmare of the Ukraine is over, there will be great changes and reforms in the Russian Church, based on decentralisation, that is, deSovietisation. A Church which is opposed to LGBT, but which is filled with homosexual bishops is only hypocritical.

Moreover, the Russian Church operates inside a society undermined by abortion and divorce and, as a result, suffers from a demographic crisis. This cannot go on. Perhaps when it has at last dealt with its own deep problems, the Russian Church can draw back the oppressed half of ROCOR which still wants to be part of the wider Orthodox Church and world, and not be part of a hate-filled sect, which condemns all others. Then they will say with other Orthodox ‘Our Father’ and mean it, participating positively in the construction of new Local Churches.

 

On the Narcissism of the Western Elite

Motivated by hatred and jealousy, narcissists detest it when empaths tell them that empaths do not need them, as we know from experience. This is what has happened between the narcissistic US elite and the rest of the world, which includes tens of millions of ordinary US citizens. Although the US elite began its war against Russia in Kiev in 2014 and has continued it until 2025, Trump has hypocritically pretended to be an intermediary in order to arrange a ‘ceasefire’. In reality, as he does not know what he thinks, he is still just as much controlled by the warlike neocons as was Biden and the Trump of 2017-2020. Nothing has changed. In reality, he has utterly failed to reach any agreement. No amount of bullying, bluster and delusional thinking is going to change reality.

He failed even in exploratory talks about a mere ceasefire with Russia and the Ukraine (originally, he had, amazingly, promised ‘peace’ within 24 hours and then within 100 days). And he also utterly failed to reach a peace agreement with Iran, in which Russia would have been a genuine intermediary, Now the US still supplies Israel which continues its unending wars against Gaza, the Lebanon, the West Bank and Syria. His warships are even hiding from the Yemenis. Trump has also failed with China and the whole world on tariffs. Here he thinks that he holds a gun to their heads – but they hold a cannon in his back. His tariffs are only taxes on poor Americans who pay the US government for cheap imported goods because the USA is so deindustrialised that it can no longer make them.

Nobody in the tightly controlled Western media has mentioned why Trump wants peace in the Ukraine – it is simply because the US elite has lost its war there and is now trying to save face. Trump is simply hiding his defeat. True, the war should have been over within a few weeks, but the West through Johnson forbade peace. This meant that Russia had to fight all NATO, which is why this war is in its fourth year. For in order to fight the whole of NATO, the Russian military first had to be reorganised, renationalised, corruption eliminated and then a huge programme of voluntary recruitment had to be implemented. Thus, the partial privatisation of the Army to the treacherous Wagner organisation, led by the corrupt oligarch Prigozhin, had to be reversed and all reorganised.

Thus, several corrupt generals and officers had to be sacked and put on trial. After such a purge of the corrupt, the whole of NATO, its poor quality arms and its thousands of troops fighting in Kiev uniforms, has been defeated. The Russian Army is today stronger and larger than all the puny NATO armies put together. It has come back from far. In 2014 it was weak, underequipped and led by naïve leaders, who thought that the West was trustworthy and honest. Thus, by its interference in Eastern Europe, the West has thrown Russia into the arms of China. And that Alliance includes Iran, North Korea, India and other countries. It is unshakeable and the more the West threatens and bullies, sanctions and tariffs all those countries, the more unshakeable the Alliance has become.

Now the West is isolated against the rest of the world, the billion against the seven billion. The Western elite is now engaged in wars against the world, not a single one of which it will or can win. Trump has failed every time because, as a narcissist filled with hubris, he hugely overestimated both his own abilities to make deals and also hugely overestimated the prestige and power of the greatly weakened US. His man-child narcissism only reflects that of the US elite. This has now reduced itself to being a Regional Power, isolated against the rest of the world. We see that the world no longer needs the US. Nowadays we can all trade and live without it and without the conflicts it has created with the rest of the world. Disaster looms for Trump the narcissist, as for all narcissists.

The Gospels are full of narcissists. Only there those self-lovers are called pharisees. Full of their own pride and imagined superiority to others and attributing great importance to their external appearance, they loved to sit in the important places and be flattered by others. However, they were whitened sepulchres decomposing and rotting on the inside. Here is the warning to all elites everywhere, not least that in Western Europe, whose worst export to the Far West, the USA, was its delusional belief in its own superiority. In reality, elites are tolerated by history only as long as they serve. Here today, gone tomorrow. For the indispensable and exceptional Nation, just like indispensable and exceptional Western Europe, is now also dispensable and unexceptional.

 

 

Translation of an Interview with the Russian Chrisma Church Website

Bright Tuesday 22 April 2025

https://t.me/s/chrisma_center

 Part One: The Orthodox World and Inter-Orthodox Relations

How would you characterise the situation of the Orthodox world and of inter-Orthodox relations today? What are the main forces and factors influencing this situation?

In the fifty years that I have been a conscious Orthodox, I have never known such a situation. The Schism, indeed multiple schisms, between Local Orthodox Churches today are unprecedented. This is a crisis.

As you know this crisis began with the action of the Patriarch of Constantinople, whose Patriarchate  received $20 million from the CIA to set up a fake nationalist Church in Kiev, composed of gangsters and murderers. (In reality he only got $15 million, as $5 million ‘disappeared’ in Kiev. Someone has to pay for the villas and the Bentleys….).

The West has used either naïve or else mercenary Ukrainians, exploiting their sense of entitlement, for its purpose, which is to destroy Russia, so it can then plunder its resources, which it has valued at nearly $100 trillion. (The Ukraine itself is irrelevant to these Western war criminals). Setting up a fake Church and using Nazis in the Ukraine were merely parts of the Western operation to weaken, destroy and then dismember Russia. It convinced nobody and failed utterly.

We see then a new ‘Cold War’, though that expression was always absurd. Both the first Cold War and this Second Cold War have been hot wars, which have left millions dead. After its rout in Vietnam, the US decided that Americans should no longer die to expand their Empire, that others should die for it, Afghans in Afghanistan, Iraqis in Iraq, Ukrainians in the Ukraine, ‘until the last Ukrainian’, as the West proclaims.

However, I remind you that the word ‘crisis’ means in Greek ‘judgement’. And this war is the Judgement of God on all concerned, on Orthodox and Non-Orthodox alike, not least the Judgement of God on Ukrainians and Russians. This is the Judgement of those who bear the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhonostsy, and those who fight against the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhobortsy. Which side are we on? That is what we must ask ourselves.

What are the fundamental positive and negative tendencies in the Orthodox world and in inter-Orthodox relations?

A Schism means that there is no communion between two parts. Negative tendencies are among those who create schisms. Thus, the only positive tendencies are among those who are trying to restore communion, despite the nationalist politicians, money-lovers and ‘Orthodox’ chauvinists, who caused these schisms. And I remind you that there are multiple schisms, although that may not be clear to all in Moscow.

Once Constantinople started in the Ukraine and Moscow broke off communion with it, other Greek chauvinists in Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus, who put their Hellenism above Christ, followed. Then Moscow moved into Alexandria’s canonical territory in Africa, apparently in revenge. There followed another schism and the Non-Greek and Non-Russian Local Churches began to lose sympathy for Moscow, which they began to see as no better than the Greeks, for it too had begun to operate on someone else’s canonical territory.

Then Moscow, through its Soviet centralisation, lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which now has over 100 of its own churches in Western Europe, outside the jurisdiction of Moscow. In Moldova there are now also over 200 parishes which have transferred from the Moscow Church there to the Romanian Church. Not a single one is going the other way and others are leaving Moscow every month. Will Moldova declare that it is autocephalous and set up its own jurisdiction in Western Europe, taking its many clergy and parishes there from Moscow? What exactly is this self-destructive streak in the Russian Church, which centralises and then attacks those who object to centralisation in search of freedom and the right to use their own language?

Then Orthodox in Latvia broke away from Moscow with a self-declared autocephaly, Estonia may follow, some in Lithuania have already left. And many liberal clergy and parishes in Western Europe and several liberal pastors inside Russia, like Fr Alexei Uminsky, have left Moscow because of what they see as Patriarchal support for the conflict in the Ukraine. His case sparked a huge scandal and reached the mainstream Western media. How, they asked, did the Persecuted Church of Russia become the Persecuting Church?

Fr Alexei has been well-known for years as a liberal, a charming but very naïve man, in the style of the former Bishop Basil (Osborne). We may not agree with liberals and their anti-patriotic streak, but he was an excellent pastor, sincere and kind, and he received the support of well over 14,000 Orthodox, who were opposed to his defrocking. And yet he was defrocked. Which is the canon that states that a good and loving priest can be defrocked because his political opinions differ from those of his bishop? Then Fr Alexis’ place was taken by an aggressive and militant maximalist, of whom it is asked: Where is the love in his words? Why do Church authorities persecute good pastors? We have received no answer to this question.

However, it is not only the pro-Western liberals who have opposed Moscow, the very conservative bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) have also publicly called on Russia to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine. And yet they have not been defrocked, even though on top of this they fell into schism from Moscow’s Western European Archdiocese and into the heresy of rebaptism, persecuting those who uphold Moscow’s viewpoint.

We are reminded that the CIA has great influence and also recruits in ROCOR and that eighty-three years ago ROCOR bishops supported Hitler and his Russian Fascist Vlasovtsy troops. Moscow appears to have no objection to this anti-Russian position of the highly Americanised ROCOR, which seems to have completely forgotten its Russian and Orthodox origins, despite its name. But inside Russia, it is different….

The falling away of the same New York-run ROCOR into the heresy of rebaptism, rebaptising Orthodox who want to go to its churches, despite the Creed which proclaims that ‘I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins’, and this, apparently, with the full support of Moscow, is serious. Yet ROCOR has since 2017 increasingly become just another American convert sect with cult followers, like other old calendarist sects. It has no knowledge of the real European Orthodoxy and it has become a type of Uniatism, a closely imitated Orthodox rite, but without the inward Orthodox and Christian spirit.

In all this I am reminded of a story from the life of President Putin. At the end of 1989 he was stationed in Dresden in East Germany and that country was breaking up around him. So they phoned Moscow: ‘What shall we do? What must we say?’. And there was no answer. ‘Moscow is silent’. Those words really marked him. But today Moscow is still silent, though this time Moscow means the Moscow Patriarchate, the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow is in denial.

Since the refusal of Moscow to deal with the unresolved ROCOR schism and then heresy (unresolved schisms always turn into heresies, look at the Roman Catholics), over thirty churches, 10% of the whole, have already left ROCOR for the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Bucharest. The former has set up a whole vicariate for them in the USA and a whole group with several churches and 15 clergy left for Bucharest in England. The fact is that the Russian Church is beginning to collapse outside the borders of the Russian Federation and Belarus. Why? Because it appears to have no adherence to the catholicity and canonicity of the Church. Moscow is silent.

Here is the fruit of Moscow’s breaking of communion. The Moscow jurisdiction is itself breaking apart. Unity is the most important thing in Church life, but it can only exist where there is love. Now chauvinism is hatred. Little wonder that in view of all this, heterodox, and not only Roman Catholics, say that the Orthodox Church no longer exists, it is broken into warring pieces, it has no catholicity. Moscow is silent.

Do you think that practical unity between the Local Orthodox Churches can be restored? What must happen for this unity to reappear? Could there be some kind of Amman format meeting?

Of course, the restoration of unity is possible, everything is possible. But it will need repentance. You may say that Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is too proud to repent, as he started it all. But there are two groups in Constantinople, that around the present Patriarch and the other, who quite openly declare that their Patriarch is mistaken. I think one of these will be the next Patriarch. The present one is very old and it is clear to all that he blundered in the Ukraine under financial pressure from the Americans, then governed by Trump who gave the Ukrainians military training and weapons, but who has now changed his tune in view of the Russian victory over the US-run NATO in its proxy war in the Ukraine.

However, there is also the schism between Moscow and Alexandria. There must be a solution here too. Moscow lost so much sympathy in the Orthodox world by entering into Africa, Alexandria’s canonical territory.

I think that after the Special Military Operation (SMO) is over in the Ukraine, there must be a Council of all 16 Autocephalous Local Churches. It is the Catholicity of the Church that has been under threat, ever since both Constantinople and Moscow insisted on centralisation. Both want unity, but Orthodox, unlike Roman Catholics, want unity in diversity, on the model of the Holy Trinity. And the word for Council is basically the same as the word for Catholicity in Slav languages. Constantinople and Moscow should not impose some Roman Catholic type of unity, that is, centralisation and rejection of Non-Greeks and Non-Russians.

Which hierarchs, theologians and others are working for the destruction of or, conversely, for the building up of Orthodox unity?

All who work in the Name of Power, Money and Outward Splendour, instead of in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, work for the destruction of Orthodox unity. The latter are the prophetic voices, those of Patriarch Porphyry of Serbia, of the Patriarchs Daniel of Bucharest and Sofia, of the late Archbishop Anastasy of Albania, and of all the others, in Poland, Georgia and Jerusalem. But all are waiting for peace in the Ukraine first. Nothing can be done until then, when a host of decisions will be taken, after the present paralysis is over.

  1. The Russian Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian Question.

What successes do you think that the Russian Orthodox Church has in external affairs, Church diplomacy, its foreign missions etc?

Here there are no successes, only catastrophic failures. Even its embraces with the Pope of Rome discredit the Russian Church. Why do you want to embrace the leader of a Church of so many homosexual and pedophile clergy, whom ordinary Catholics cannot stand? Orthodox and Catholics begin to think that the Orthodox who embrace Catholic clergy must themselves be homosexuals and pedophiles. Birds of a feather flock together, as they say.

One very young, very inexperienced, very racist and very arrogant Moscow Metropolitan said a few years ago, when he learned that masses of Non-Russians were leaving Moscow: ‘Too bad for them’. He did not see that in fact it is too bad for the Moscow Patriarchate, which is the loser, and so much the better for those who leave it. In such a situation, the Russian Orthodox Church should be renamed ‘The Russian Nationalist Church’. Perhaps he would agree to that? Catastrophic failures, indeed.

Only 20 years ago, the Orthodox world was praising the Russian Church, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, the bastion and hope of Orthodoxy. In 2003, His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I knew, wanted to found a Local Western European Orthodox Church. And now all is lost! Moscow is losing its Diaspora, of which at least half, if not three-quarters, is made up of Ukrainians and Moldovans, whom Moscow has continually treated as second-class citizens. Last year Metr Vladimir of Moldova himself wrote publicly about this ill treatment to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. We, who are at the grassroots, have seen concrete examples of this racism and hatred towards Non-Russians every week over the last fifty years. Non-Russians have gradually been chased out of the Russian Nationalist Church.

As a result, the numbers attending Russian chapels and communities in this country, outside the Cathedral in London., are of the order of 10, 20 or 30 people. The numbers are tiny. Conversely, Greek and Romanian churches get hundreds, up to a thousand every Sunday. The Russian Church is dying out. For example, in our Romanian parish we have to give communion from three or four chalices every Sunday to those who have had confession.

I was brought up in the old Russian emigration. Metr Antony of Sourozh, who tonsured me reader in 1981, the St Seraphim-like Archbishop George (Tarasov) in Paris, who had been a pilot on the Western Front in the First World War, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor of St John of Shanghai, and who ordained me priest nearly 35 years ago, and above all the greatest Russian emigre of them all, Vladyka John of Shanghai, the saint, born in what is now the Ukraine, would be horrified by what is happening now. I spent my life working for the unity of the Russian Church; now the young and inexperienced, younger than our children, have been allowed to destroy that unity. Why? Who are these Young Turks who create schisms, sects and heresies?

What would you say are the strengths and the weaknesses of the Russian Church as regards its external activities and in inter-Orthodox relations?

I can see no strengths at all, as it has quite isolated itself from the Orthodox mainstream and at present shows no humility or desire to return to the mainstream.

The weaknesses of the Russian Church are eight in number, as follows:

Centralisation, militarisation, nationalisation, bureaucratisation, oligarchisation of the episcopate (corruption). From here you have a great many cases of careerism, ecumenism, episcopal homosexualisation.

It is all politics instead of pastors, protocols instead of the Gospel of Christ, chauvinist hatred instead of Love. Ask any Ukrainian from Kiev. Ask any Moldovan. Ask any Orthodox in Western Europe.

What could reinforce the positions and authority of the Russian Church?

The restoration, not reinforcement (it is too late for that), of the authority and positions of the Russian Church can only come through repentance and missionary work. The latter can only be successful if it accepts Non-Russians as they are. Otherwise, the Russian Church will die out here, just as the first and second waves of the Russian emigration died out here. You cannot Russify what is not Russian, though you can make it Orthodox. To do missionary work means to decentralise and grant autocephaly to the missions, once they are large enough to stand on their own two feet.

To my mind, the Church of the Ukraine (that is, the Church inside the new borders of the new Ukrainian State, whatever they will be and whatever it will be called) should receive autocephaly, as should Orthodox in Moldova and in the four Baltic States of Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Lithuania. These three should at once receive autocephaly. Otherwise, the Orthodox in those countries will go on splitting into different groups in disunity. It is still not too late to recover Church unity in the Ukraine, Moldova and Estonia in particular. Moscow centralisation only kills unity, as we can see everywhere in the Diaspora.

I have to mention here that the quality of the Russian bishops sent from Russia to Western Europe has been disastrous, apart from the one exception of Metr Nestor, who is excellent. There has been one scandal after another, though I will not go into details here. You cannot hide or censor scandals in the open, internet societies of Western Europe. For example, in London there lives Maxim, the ex-bishop who was defrocked for running a drugs factory with his boyfriend in Saint Petersburg. He was already notorious for his depravity when he was a priest in London, so they sent him back to Russia, where they made him a bishop, along with the two Ignatys! It is all so sad.

And in ROCOR it is no better, we have seen them all pass by here, one an anthroposophist, another a fanatic, one an alcoholic, another a homosexual parading with his boyfriend and his narcissistic and vindictive rages and alcohol, another CIA…God save us all!

How is the Russian Church perceived in the Western world today?

After all the above and then after the Budapest scandal, how do you think the Russian Church is perceived? It has totally discredited itself and is seen as hypocritical. How can the Russian Church be against the LGBT brigade, when it has so many homosexuals? If a priest were homosexual, he would be defrocked, but not a bishop. Strange. It is so sad, when 15-20 years ago the Russian Church was riding high on zeal for the New Martyrs and Confessors, and everything was still possible.

What for you would be the best outcome of the Ukrainian Church problem?

Let us be frank. The Soviet Ukraine, exactly like ‘Europe’ or the UK, is an artificial construct, created for purely ideological reasons. The Ukraine must be broken down into its component parts. It was constructed by three atheist dictators, Lenin who in 1922 gave Novorossija to the Ukraine from Russia, Stalin who between 1939 and 1945 grabbed land from Poland, Hungary and Romania, and then Khrushchov, who in 1954 gave Russian Crimea away to Kiev. It is strange to see how the West, supposedly the advocate of self-determination, freedom and democracy (!), so ardently supports the oppression and injustices of these three Communist dictators! Kiev oppresses all its minorities, some 40% or more of the population, and the West supports that oppression. But then the West is just as atheistic as the Communist dictators, so I suppose it is normal. Atheists everywhere have the same values, whether Communists or Capitalists. They are all oligarchs.

It seems to me that North Bukovina (Chernivtsy) should be returned to Romania, so-called ‘Zakarpat’e’ (Subcarpathian Rus) to Hungary and the two and a half Greek Catholic provinces next to the Polish border (‘U-krajina’) of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western half of Ternopol should be returned to Poland (or else they should become an independent Galician State and be closed off by barbed wire from the Orthodox world). Novorossija should be returned to Russia, leaving the ten and a half provinces of Kiyivska Rus, Kievan Rus, to be independent and sovereign. All that would have to be confirmed by self-determination, by referenda, after the full liberation of the Ukraine from the Neo-Nazi Banderists in Kiev and Galicia. Then the canonical Church in the new Kievan Rus State should be given autocephaly by Moscow. Will any of this actually happen? God will decide.

What could change in the Orthodox world after the end of the SMO in the Ukraine?

I think Patriarch Bartholomew will retire or ‘be retired’. There are plenty of anti-Ukrainian Greek bishop-candidates ready to take his place and Trump and Vance would support one of them. Just as Biden supported Patriarch Bartholomew.

More generally, there would have to be an Inter-Orthodox Council, a free one, held in humility, unlike the absurd meeting in Crete nine years ago.

It is a strange thing that the greatest economic and political event in the world in the last sixteen years was the Russian foundation of BRICS in Ekaterinburg in 2009. BRICS is an Alliance of Sovereign Nations, based on the profoundly Orthodox principle of Unity in Diversity, the principle of the Holy Trinity. It is strange that secular countries can follow that principle and hold summits every year, but not the Church, which seems to want Roman Catholic style or Soviet-style centralisation, instead of Councils and Conciliarity/Catholicity.

President Putin has on numerous occasions remarked that: ‘He who is not nostalgic for the USSR has no heart, but he who wants it back has no brain’. It seems to me that there are some in the Russian Church who have not yet heard his words.

Do you have refugees from the Ukraine among your parishioners?  What churches do they attend? How do they see the conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches? Are there any difficulties with them?

Of course, we have many refugees, who come from the canonical Church of Vladyka Onufry. They attend any churches except for Russian churches. In London they have their own Ukrainian parishes. Russians must understand that the vast majority of Ukrainians will now never attend churches where His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill is commemorated. The Russian Church has lost the Ukraine for ever. We have no conflicts with any Ukrainians, because we accept them as we accept all Orthodox nationalities, including canonical Ukrainians who have been here for many years.

Does the British government support these refugees?

Of course, as do all Western governments. However, that support is political, not humanitarian. One day Western governments will drop them. All that Western governments are interested in is people who are anti-Russian. It is all very hypocritical, they do not care for Ukrainians as such.

  1. Orthodoxy in Great Britain

What is the situation of the Orthodox community in Great Britain? Is it growing? Or is the Orthodox presence the same as before?

There has been massive growth here over the last 15 years. This growth has been by immigration, specifically that of Romanians and Moldovans. Until then, there had been about 300,000 Orthodox here, with 200,000 Cypriots, and some 100,000 Serbs, Russians (mainly from the Baltics), Bulgarians, non-canonical Ukrainians and others. Then, over the last fifteen years, there arrived 1.1 million Romanians and Moldovans, meaning that today 1.4 million, 2% of the UK population, are Orthodox, I in 50, the vast majority Romanian-speaking.

Which Orthodox Churches are the most active and authoritative in Great Britain today?

Without doubt the Greeks and the Romanians. The Greeks now have several bishops, I think, six, and only on Lazarus Saturday they baptised 200 adults, nearly all Non-Greeks, in a mass baptism. They own many churches, though they suffer from the problem of elderly clergy, the result of 30 years of paralysis before their new Archbishop arrived here in 2019.

The Romanians are continually opening or buying new churches and dozens of seminary-qualified men are being ordained priests. I cannot remember when a Russian man was last ordained priest. It must be at least 10 years ago. As a result, the Russian Church is dying out. Other Orthodox, like the Serbs, Bulgarians and Georgians, also live in very small national ghettoes and do not produce their own clergy. As for the very small Antiochian group, virtually without Arab immigrants, they are intent on recruiting minute numbers of Anglicans Evangelicals, which is all rather strange and, just like the very small ROCOR, including their bishop, their clergy are not trained in Orthodox seminaries, but are untrained and the priests are part-time. That level of ignorance creates many problems. Thus, the Antiochians here are proud to give Copts and Ethiopians communion.

What is the attitude of the British government to Orthodox? Does it favour one jurisdiction over another? Is any support given? Are there political pressures on Orthodox clergy?

The British government remains, as always, completely indifferent to all. The government is atheist. There is no support at all for Orthodox, but no political pressure or persecution either. It is a free market.

Do native English, Scottish etc people join the Orthodox Church? If so, what attracts them?

Over the last 75 years some thousands of native people have joined the Church. I am one of them, 50 years ago. The late Metr Antony of Sourozh was one of those who played a role in this movement, though he seems to have converted almost only from the upper class. But a few thousand is a very small number over 75 years and many have passed away in that time. What attracts them? Spirituality, definitely not politics or nationalism. Nationalist parishes never have any converts. The heterodox world is unspiritual and woke. Who is attracted to that? Spiritual emptiness does not attract, just as a desert does not attract. The Faith of authentic Orthodoxy attracts, but not flag-waving nationalism, meaningless ritualism or corruption. Some Orthodox will die out, others will survive and expand. It all depends on spiritual content, or lack of it.

How do Orthodox perceive the immigration of Africans and Asians. Are there conflicts with them, with Muslims for example? Are they frightened for their future?

Forgive me, but this is a very strange question! You live in Russia, where there are two to three times more Muslims than here! Here most Orthodox are immigrants themselves, why should they have problems with other immigrants? The second language in England is Romanian, the third is Polish. I find Muslims especially respectful. One of them told me that only Orthodox are real Christians. They have little time for the others. We have baptised three former Muslims into our congregation, two Turks and one Iranian. One of our Ukrainian parishioners, who has been here for over 15 years, is a builder and helps build mosques for them. What a pity that Orthodox do not build churches! There are certainly no conflicts with such immigrants. We are not racists! Why should we be frightened of them? I do not understand your question.