Category Archives: The Ukraine

The Russian-Founded New World Order and Moving to Russia

Introduction: Why I Have Not Moved to Russia

As a fluent Russian-speaker, I wanted to move to Russia when I was actually 20, when I was invited to study at the Moscow Theological Academy in 1977, but the Cold War prevented that. I would long ago have moved there, if I were 20 years old. In the last twelve months I have been invited to move there, where the futile slanders of me by one here are mocked, to serve as a priest by two Patriarchal bishops, whom I know and who know the real situation.

However, my family lives here and my Russian and other parishioners need me here. I will not be going to Russia, unless my whole family, all 27 of us, wishes to go. I prefer to stay and continue the fight against the ecumenists, against the covidists, and against the pseudo-Russian schismatics. I was, by God’s will, born here. God put me here to do something here. When I was 18 and the late Metropolitan Kallistos told me that, I did not know what that something was.

Gradually, the twofold sense of my life was revealed to me. It was to witness to Western European Orthodoxy, to St Felix, St Edmund and the ten thousand other Western Saints, whom St John also venerated, and so to restore the Non-Establishment West, and, secondly, in the words of the ever-memorable Slovak Metropolitan Laurus, ‘to keep the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. This meant to act against the rogues of left and right, against both the scribes and against the pharisees.

This meant fighting against both the spiritually empty intellectuals, ecumenists and modernists, and the equally spiritually empty ‘princes of the Church’, whose only interests are their preening narcissism and love of power and money. Both sides, acting together against the mainstream, that is, against the mighty river, of the Church of God, are too cowardly and unprincipled to stand up to such corrupt bullies, anti-family perverts and psychopaths, and they repeat their slanders against us. But we are not cowards and unprincipled. God is the Judge of those who repeat slanders against us.

Russian Military, Political and Diplomatic Victories

In the wide world, today the government of President Putin is liberating the bankrupt Ukraine and its patriotic and persecuted faithful from NATO Nazism, as promoted by the local Fascist rogues in Kiev. Clearly, this conflict will end with the Kiev regime’s capitulation. Russia hopes that this capitulation will take place through a popular Ukrainian insurrection against the Kiev regime. That is possible. The US-created Ukraine is the biggest loser of this war, but not far behind it is the now isolated and impoverished Western Europe. This has lost greatly, as it has committed economic suicide by boycotting cheap Russian gas, oil, fertiliser and other resources and has also taken in eight million very expensive Ukrainians, who became very unpopular there through their demands and sense of entitlement. As for the third loser, the ungoverned USA, it has already abandoned the Ukraine, just as it abandoned Afghanistan and Iraq before it.

Internationally, the same Russian government has created a defensive Alliance with China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Mongolia. Thus, Russia’s borders, east and west are now secured and protected, much as they were in January 1904, before the West attacked Russia indirectly (through Japan, which later wanted to destroy Korea, China and Mongolia), and then in January 1914, before the West attacked Russia directly. South Asia, India, is already with Russia and we will soon see the consolidation of the Eurasian heartland, as Central Asia joins this defensive Alliance of Eurasia.

As for the Russian-sponsored BRICS Economic Alliance, even now 45% of the world population, it was founded in 2009 in Ekaterinburg, the City of the Martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and his Family, a martyrdom ordered from New York. BRICS, now with nine countries, includes other countries from Asia (the UAE), Africa (Ethiopia and South Africa) and Latin America (Brazil). In Kazan, in seven weeks’ time, new members will ask to join the BRICS Alliance, some say thirty countries, some say more, though most of them may not actually be joining as early as this year. Among the candidates are countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Cuba, Bolivia, Gabon, Venezuela, Belarus, Turkiye, Algeria, Indonesia, Vietnam, Serbia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and even, one day, for the moment EU Hungary, Slovakia and Italy.

Russian victory was imminent at the end of 1916, liberating Vienna in summer 1917 and Berlin in autumn 1917, just before the Western prevented that victory by overthrowing the Tsar with its agents and replacing him with the Western agents, Lenin and Trotsky, the former of whom created the Ukraine, the second of whom was born in what is now the Ukraine. Russia is back. This Russian victory may be imminent again, in 2024 – unless the West can overthrow the present Tsar. Over a century of thwarted Russian victory may be over at last, despite the spies, traitors, perverts and schismatics who have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian-United Eurasia and European Collapse

Three of the four world’s superpowers and largest economies are in Asia: China, India and Russia.  China and India were once far more prosperous and far more advanced than Europe, before Western Europeans colonised, exploited and destroyed them. That process has now gone into reverse: Asia now dominates Western Europe. Moreover, Eurasian Russia is getting Asia to unite. East Asia (China etc), West Asia (the old ‘Middle East’), South Asia (India etc) and North Asia (Russia) are uniting. Apart from the still hesitant five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, what is missing is US-occupied North-West Asia (what is still called ‘Western Europe’, 5% of the world population) and US-occupied North-East Asia (the ever-shrinking Japan and South Korea).

The hope is that both the latter, the North-West Asian Peninsula (the Western half of Europe, which has so disastrously tried to expand into the Eastern half, in the Ukraine) and the North-East Asian Archipelago (Japan and South Korea), will liberate themselves from Americanisation (camouflaged beneath the word ‘Globalism’) and enter into this Grand Alliance of the Global Majority of BRICS. For this to happen patriotic left and patriotic right have to unite against the anti-patriotic, NATO-Nazi Globalists of the US-created Uniparty, who are the real extremists. Liberation from the 20% of the pro-US, pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-Kiev and pro-Woke Globalist Establishment is what the 80%, the peoples of Western Europe, seek. For the Globalists always put anti-national interests first, to the detriment of their own electorates.

Such liberation from the Establishment, the System, as it is called in Germany (‘the Deep State’ in the USA), is now the electoral path in the UK, France, Germany and almost every other country in Western Europe, against the highly unpopular ruling class elite. We the people want our sovereignty and our national identity, which we believe is in our saints, back. In the meantime, we have to face the contemporary Western reality. This is summed up by both the opening and closing ceremonies of the Pagan Games in Paris, which show exactly what its nature is. The Serbian Orthodox tennis player Novak Djokovich and some African athletes resisted the persecution and blasphemies against Christianity there, but few others did.

LGBT ideology and transgenderism dominate the Western Establishment (for example, the millionaire pedophiles employed by the BBC) more and more. It is shocking. The West has become the collapsing Soviet Union. It is 1989 in the West. As a result, President Putin has issued an executive order to take in spiritual refugees from the West, on condition that they share in the traditional religious values of the Russian Federation and that they are under persecution. Should people move there?

Moving to Russia

So far only one Russian family from our parish has moved to Russia, though not because they were under persecution. That was eighteen months ago.  It was a great success financially. They both have jobs which they like and they are already able to buy their own home. One other parishioner is thinking about following their example, but most of my many Russian parishioners are not even contemplating it. Let alone our Ukrainians, Balts, Romanians, Moldovans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and the other twenty-one nationalities among our 600 regular parishioners.

Here some should take care, not returning Russians who know the situation perfectly well, but naïve and idealistic Non-Russian converts to Orthodoxy. They should ask themselves many questions first: Why do most Russians stay here and new Russians even want to come here? Why do they not return and others still want to leave Russia? The fact is that in today’s Russia, most live in high-rise tower blocks, abortion is twice even the appalling level of Western countries, divorce is just as high as in the West, and most baptised Orthodox are still cremated when they die. Beware of ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ syndrome.

Then there is the bureaucracy (just as bad as in France) and corruption, which is especially noticeable when it comes to health care with its universal envelopes under the table. As for the Church, only 2-3% go to church, partly because of the problems of corrupt and oligarchic homosexual bishops and money-grubbing priests (those two problems helped cause the post-1917 persecution of the Church). What many in the West do not understand is that Russia is dominated by a cultural Orthodoxy, rather than a zealous, practising Orthodoxy, just like every other country in the Orthodox world.

Then there are purely practical questions. Do you speak Russian? You will have to learn. What money will you live off, if you live in Russia? What job will you find? How will your children adapt to a very different and much tougher school system? Will you attend church in Slavonic and on the old calendar? (If you do not do so here, how will you cope there?). Just a little dose of reality.

Conclusion: Avoiding Escapism

For most it is too early to contemplate moving to Russia. Let us wait and see. As long as we can still be saved here, as long as we can still fight and resist here, despite the persecution of us here, not by LGBT fanatics, but by certain so-called ‘Orthodox’ bishops, let us stay here. To leave now seems like running away. We still have the chance to win here.

 

After the End-Game in the Ukraine

Introduction: After the Conflict

After two and a half years of conflict in the Ukraine, we have at last arrived at the end-game. There may even be less than six months to go, as the conflict could even end on about its 1,000th day, in mid-November. What will happen once the end-game is over, whether that is in 2024 or in 2025? Once the war is won, how will the peace be won? What will post-conflict Ukraine look like? What are the differences in intentions between the ‘moderates’ and the ‘hardliners’ in Moscow?

Provinces Returned to the Russian Federation?

At first, in 2014, the profoundly Russian Crimea and Sevastopol (which also counts as  a province) returned to Russia by overwhelming popular consent after sixty years of Communist-enforced separation. This was extremely popular. Then, because of Kiev’s genocidal aggression there, in February 2022 the two provinces of the Russian Donbass also returned to Russia by overwhelming popular consent. Next, because of Kiev’s threats to the Crimea, in late 2022, Russian Zaporozhie and Kherson also returned to Russia, again by overwhelming popular vote in referenda. Both the moderates and the hardliners in Moscow agree about the return of these six Russian provinces with their pre-war population of twelve million, as also about the neutrality of the Ukraine, that it will never become part of NATO.

Unlike the moderates in Moscow, however, the hardliners want Russia to take back the rest of Novorossija, another four provinces, namely, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa, though also by referenda, which are still to be held. Moreover, the fate of the three provinces of Sumy, Chernigov and Poltava, which are also on the west bank of the Dnieper, hangs in the balance as well -the hardliners want them too. If they transfer to Russia, then much of the territory conquered by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, his son, Tsar Peter the Great and Tsarina Catherine the Great some 300 years ago, will be restored to Russia. If these seven provinces returned to Russia, this would reduce the New Ukraine to fourteen provinces out of the original twenty-seven.

A Province Returned to Romania?

As a result of Kiev’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk province, continual drone attacks on and terrorist threats to civilians and installations far inside Russia, most of the remainder of the Ukraine is probably going to end up as a third Union State, independent in local affairs, but otherwise more or less under Russian control, in effect a client state similar to Belarus. However, from this remainder of the Ukraine, the very small province of Chernivtsy (North Bukovina), or most of it, may, if it chooses to do so by referendum, return to Romania, from where it was taken in 1945. This transfer could perhaps take place in exchange for Transdnestria and Gagauzia, which overwhelmingly want to leave Romanian-speaking Moldova and join Russia. However, that will depend on Moldova, not on Romania.

If the rest of Moldova then chooses to rejoin Romania by referendum, perhaps on the Russian condition that all NATO bases are closed in Romania, that will be their choice. However, we think it much more likely that Moldovans will choose to remain independent of EU Romania and so free to receive cheap Russian energy. In that case, in an independent Moldova, the Moldovan Orthodox Church must receive joint autocephaly from the Russian and the Romanian Orthodox Churches, with all so-called ‘defrocked’ clergy (defrocked for purely political and non-canonical reasons) ‘refrocked’, as is always done in the case of political defrockings. Church unity can then be achieved there.

Provinces Returned to Hungary, Slovakia and Poland?

As for Hungary, it should also take back the tiny slice of Hungarian territory on the edge of the Ukrainian border. This would be taken from the strangely-named province of Zakarpattia, which could get back its old name of Podkarpatska Rus (Subcarpathian Rus) and also possibly return to Hungary or else to Slovakia.

Then there comes the situation of the Western provinces of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, and possible the next three other far western, formerly Polish provinces of Volyn, Rovno and Ternopol. Should they be separated from the future New Ukraine and return to Poland, as the moderates recommend? True, the CIA and MI6 financed and supplied anti-Russian, Neo-Nazi terrorism in far western Ukraine from 1948 until at least 1958 and many Russian patriots died there.

For this reason, the moderates do not want to touch this territory. However, now that most of the Neo-Nazis have been killed in the conflict or have fled to the West, there would be much less opposition there to remaining in a New Ukraine, which would have a measure of independence. Surely Russia is obliged to secure its borders by controlling this territory, rather than giving it back to Poland? The danger is after all that any unliberated territory, or territory handed over to Poland, will be turned into use as a NATO terrorist base against you. So argue the hardliners, who would thus reduce the New Ukraine to seven provinces.

Conclusion: The New Ukraine

This New Ukraine or Malorossija would be left perhaps with a minimum of seven provinces and a maximum of twenty-one, counting the City of Kiev and the Kiev province separately. It would have a population of between about nine and twenty-five million, providing that all ten million or so who left to work in the West in the last ten years return, which is highly unlikely. Essentially, it will be a landlocked, southern and large Belarus. Although it will be bankrupted, it will never pay the debts of the old regime back to the West, especially to the City of London, and will be rebuilt by Russia and China. Surely, however, its canonical Church would have to receive autocephaly from Moscow and become a centre of national unity and identity, just as in the future Moldova.

 

 

The Fall of Kiev and the Fall of the American Empire

The conflict in the Ukraine exists because the US political, military and media Establishment and its vassals in Western Europe want it to exist. Virtually all Western politicians from Lindsey Graham to Kaja Kallas, from Antony Blinken to Boris Johnson, have made it crystal clear that the aim of the conflict has never been to support the Ukraine, which they despise (even if they do know where it is), but to destroy Russia, ‘until the last Ukrainian is dead’. The Ukraine is merely a useful idiot, a proxy, a battering ram aimed at Russia, no more. All this is clear from the 2019 report of the Rand Corporation, the think tank of the Pentagon, a report which is publicly available.

No ordinary people want this conflict, neither in the USA, nor in Western Europe, nor in the Ukraine, whose wretched cannon fodder people are its main victims. Popular opposition is visible in Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia. Elsewhere opposition is hidden or else labelled ‘populist’, ‘far left’ or ‘far right’ by the oligarchic elite of the Western Establishment, but it still exists among the non-brainwashed population. For the conflict exists and continues because of US megalomania and, above all, because of the ever greedier US military-industrial complex, which demands ever more profit.

These two factors, megalomania and greed, have always accompanied every empire. The Roman Empire, ruled by a clique of greedy oligarchs in Rome, the medieval Roman Catholic Empire, with its megalomaniac inquisitions and greedy indulgences, the Spanish Empire, megalomaniac to spread Catholicism and greedy for gold and silver mined by slaves, the French Empire of the megalomaniac ‘Sun-King’, which went bankrupt financing the American War of Independence, the British Empire, which died of greed and hubris, and the Soviet Empire, which wanted to dominate the world, all fell because of megalomania and greed. Every time the megalomania grew too great and every time the greed for profit grew too strong, empires fell.

If we take the case of the British Empire, we can see how, despite the sinister warnings of the humiliating Boer War with its British concentration camps and the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic in 1912, it still entered into the Great European War in 1914. It did not need to and could instead have mediated as a blessed peacemaker and brought peace. It did not do that because of its megalomania and greed. Thus, it emerged from that war in 1918 on crutches. When it emerged from the second part of that war in 1945, the inevitable result of the unjust ‘peace’ of 1918, it was not on crutches, but in a wheelchair. Its greed in countries ranging from India to Singapore and China to Kenya, had been punished. It was the result of megalomania (‘the sun never sets on our empire’) and City of London greed to strip all the countries which it invaded of their natural resources.

If we take the case of the Soviet Empire, we can see how, despite the warning of the German invasion of 1941 and the catastrophic genocide of Slavs by the Nazis, it still built itself up in Eastern and Central Europe (East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia), in Korea, Vietnam, in decolonising Africa, and finally in Afghanistan. It was this last war which finished it off. Bankruptcy was the result of its megalomaniac overreach. Its successor State, the Russian Federation, has at least learned its lesson and no longer wants to impose itself on the rest of the world and wants to prioritise itself.

Today we see the same process in the American Empire. Since 1945, when it ended up on the winning side in Europe only thanks to the sacrificial victory of the Soviet Union, it has never won a war (the US invasion of tiny Grenada was hardly a war). For example, its war in Korea ended in a stalemate, and it lost all its other wars, in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In each case it was routed. Now in the Ukraine, it faces the same rout. ‘We have won’, ‘this is the end of history’, we can do anything’, ‘we are exceptional’ are only hubristic delusions which its Establishment feeds on.

This threatened rout is why NATO has in desperation launched its last-ditch invasion of the largely deserted forests of the Kursk province in the south of Russia with all its technology. The casino-playing NATO, that is, Washington, has staked everything on this operation. Having failed by far to take the Kursk Nuclear Power Station and lost over 7,000 of its troops already, it has now been reinforced by thousands more troops. Eighty-one years ago, in 1943, Kursk was fighting against German tanks. Now German tanks are there again. As one Dutch farmer put it: ‘Russia saved us from Napoleon. Russia saved us from Hitler. Russia, please save us from Washington’.

The atheists in Kiev have forgotten that the city of Kursk is the birthplace of the prophetic St Seraphim of Sarov. The atheists in Kiev have also forgotten that, having invaded the southern tip of the province of Kursk, they then banned the Orthodox Church. The consequences of this for the Kiev atheists and their Western puppeteers are enormous. God is not mocked, as atheists will soon find out.

The fall of the American Empire will be all the greater than the fall of all those which fell before it, because America was never satisfied with just taking a portion of the Globe, like the empires before it, it greedily wanted everything, according to its megalomaniac ideology of Globalism. For Globalism is the ultimate form of megalomania and greed combined. This will become visible to all at the BRICS Alliance summit in Kazan in two months’ time, from 22 -24 October. This will be attended by a great many representatives of the Global Majority, not least the leaders of the first, third and fifth largest economies in the world: China, India and Russia. Dozens more countries want to join the 9 members of BRICS. By contrast to Washington, these members preach not Globalism, but Multilateralism – the future.

 

 

24 August 2024: ‘Democratic’ Ukraine Bans its National Church

On 24 August the Western-backed and Western-financed ex-President Zelensky (legally he has been a dictator since May) signed a law banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. (Zelensky is by race a Jew and by faith an atheist). This is because this Church is a Non-Western Church (just as the Ukraine is a Non-Western country), only a semi-independent part of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow. This law will be enacted in 30 days’ time. What are the options?

First of all, Ukrainian Orthodox (= the vast majority of Ukrainians) will not attend any of the fake Churches, including the nationalist, pro-Nazi fake ‘Church’, invented by Washington by paying the Greek Patriarch to set it up. This is much to the present embarrassment of that Greek Patriarch, who, he now claims, naively thought that Ukrainians would attend such a Church, founded on theft and violence, encouraged by its gangster leaders, and composed of defrocked or unordained ‘clergy’.

This means that Ukrainian Orthodox will either stop going to church and wait for better times, or else they will try and go to church and get beaten up or killed or be arrested and put in prison. Christian blood on the streets is apparently what the Western Powers and the Greek Patriarch are sponsoring.

Some say that the Russian Patriarch of Moscow, Kyrill, and the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, whose combined ages are 161, could do something else. Patriarch Bartholomew could dissolve his failed, fake Church on condition that Patriarch Kyrill officially gives the Ukrainian Orthodox Church full independence, known as ‘autocephaly’. For only a Mother-Church, in this case, Moscow, can grant autocephaly. And if the Ukrainian Orthodox Church becomes autocephalous, Zelensky’s law will be meaningless.

That would be a miracle. If it happened, all the other Local Orthodox Churches, all 14 of them, would automatically recognise the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a canonical, autocephalous Church, the 17th member of the Orthodox family. And Moscow and Constantinople could enter back into communion. And this could happen even with a Council of the whole Church.

However, such happiness is highly unlikely. What is likely?

Far more likely is that within the next few months Russia will take over the whole of the Ukraine, partly militarily and partly politically. The Ukraine will either entirely disappear as a nation-state, or else will exist with about one third of the territory it previously had and be fully dependent on Moscow. In other words, it will return exactly to its situation before Communist dictators created it after 1922. 100 years of errors will be over. Then the law banning the Church will be as irrelevant as ex-President Zelensky and his whole illegal government, which will have disappeared by then.

However, in such a case, just as Constantinople failed to force people to attend its fake Church, so Moscow will not be able to force people to attend a Church still dependent on it. As the Russian proverb says: ‘You will not endear yourself by force’. Or as the English proverb says: ‘You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink’.

In any case, the problem will remain. Either the Russian Orthodox Church is a nationalist organisation, or else it is a multinational and missionary Church. It will have to choose. Either it adapts to and adopts other cultures, or else it will remain as a mononational Church with no multinational significance, as some of its senior bishops want.

 

 

The End-Game for the Ukrainian State and Church?

https://savetheuoc.com/press-release-ukraines-passage-of-8371-is-a-grotesque-violation-of-religious-freedom/

Militarily, the Ukraine is collapsing. In the east Russian forces are advancing some miles almost every day, as former Kiev strongholds, undermanned and underequipped, fall. In the north, the NATO-planned operation to ‘invade’ Russia through the southern tip of the province of Kursk with up to 15,000 elite troops (2,000 of whom are Polish, American, British and French, but wearing Ukrainian uniforms) is turning into a bloodbath. Over 4,000 of those troops are already dead or seriously wounded. Many others have surrendered. That was a last act of desperation, a last chance to do something big. It too has failed, as the NATO-led Ukrainians are outmatched and outgunned in every was.

Two and a half years ago, all that Russia wanted was a neutral Ukraine and human rights for its Russian inhabitants. The USA forbade that. And slowly the USA escalated this war, arming and training Kiev troops. Even only a few weeks ago, Russia was still prepared to open peace negotiations with Kiev. Other BRICS countries were encouraging this. That is over. Now NATO, not the Ukraine, has invaded Russia. The Kursk Operation was NATO-planned, NATO-trained, NATO-equipped and NATO-financed. Here there are echoes of Napoleon’s multinational Western invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler’s equally multinational invasion of Russia in 1941. When will the West stop invading Russia? After each previous invasion from Western Europe, Western Europe was entirely reshaped. Here is the future for it. As for the Ukraine, it no longer has any future as such.

Meanwhile, there is also chaos in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Seeing these words, some will say: ‘No news here, it always is in chaos’. The confusion comes from the existence of so many pseudo-Orthodox Churches – here, clearly, I am not referring to the many US-founded Baptist/Pentecostalist sects in the country, which have no pretence of being Orthodox. Apart from the very few actual Roman Catholics, who are very traditional and more or less condemn the Second Vatican Council as heretical (and who have in the past contacted me), there are the not very many ‘Greek Catholics’. Neither Greek, nor Catholic (!), they are better known as Uniats, as they vaguely pretend to be Orthodox, but think like very old-fashioned, very right-wing and very anti-semitic Polish Catholics.

Then come those who call themselves ‘Ukrainian Orthodox’. There is the tiny group around the long since defrocked ‘Metropolitan’ (or is it Patriarch?) Filaret of Kiev. Nobody, not even Constantinople or his own children (both with Metr Onufry), takes this money-greedy (ex-?) Communist criminal seriously. Then comes the ‘OCU’, (‘the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’), a group of clerically-dressed thugs and defrocked clergy who have stolen many churches from the actual Ukrainian Orthodox Church and whose favourite instruments are not liturgical, but angle-grinders and bolt-cutters. Their ideology appears to be Neo-Nazi, though they do convince a few patriotic but unchurched Ukrainians that they are actually Orthodox. After all, they were founded by the Patriarchate of Constantinople under American orders and greased with millions of US dollars, now nearly six years ago. Now using the Catholic calendar for their services, no serious Orthodox takes them seriously.

There is in reality only one real, internationally recognised and canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. 95% + of Ukrainian Orthodox belong to it, despite vicious persecution by the Neo-Nazi Ukrainian State. Its ruling hierarch is Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and All the Ukraine. It is this Church which has today been banned by the Rada, or Parliament, in Kiev (269 votes for, 29 votes against). So much for American-sponsored freedom and democracy in the Ukraine. America is the new atheist Soviet Union, it seems. However, the law must be signed by the President, after which it can only be enacted after thirty days. Now things are moving quickly to stop this.

Constantinople warned the Ukrainians not to pass this law. Constantinople now knows that the OCU is fake and that the only real Church is the one Kiev wants to ban. Kiev has just disobeyed. Of course, Constantinople in itself has no power. But behind it stands the USA. The local Greek Archbishop there, Elpidiforos, who four years ago had his photograph taken with Biden, whom then he praised and told everyone to vote for, is now seen with Trump. Trump is much less keen on the Ukraine. His Catholic Vice-Presidential running-mate, Senator Vance, is a supporter of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Everybody knows that probably the next US President, if still unassassinated, will be Trump, and that he is fed up with giving money to subsidise everything in the Ukraine, which without US dollars would have gone bankrupt years ago.

Moreover, everybody knows that Patriarch Bartholomew is now aged 84. Archbishop Elpidiforos is very keen to succeed him. As also is Metropolitan Emmanuel (Adamakis). The former has taken against the Ukrainian OCU, the latter very much did the dirty work to found it. Now a delegation from there is going to Kiev, as they wanted to before. (Let us hope that the dreaded SBU Kiev Secret Police, will not assassinate them). Constantinople is very keen for it not to be seen as the instigator of a law to ban the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Given the failure of its OCU fantasy, it may at last be ready to repeal its statute (‘tomos’ in Greek) which founded the OCU and re-establish relations with Metropolitan Onufry’s canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the rest of the Orthodox world, from which it has isolated itself.

Having implemented its OCU gaffe six years ago, this would be a convenient let-out (in American English ‘off-ramp’) for Constantinople. If Constantinople states that it was lied to by the OCU, it can unrecognise it. If it were sensible it could even offer Metr Onufry autocephaly for his Church. That would put the Moscow Church, of which the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is de jure, but not de facto, a part, and to which for over thirty years it refused to grant autocephaly, in a tight corner. Of course, it may will not do this. Instead, some say that Constantinople wants to open up yet a new ecclesiastical structure in the Ukraine, an Exarchate, under the notorious and hated Archbishop Job (Getcha). That would be a great pity, because it now has an opportunity to improve relations with Moscow and embarrass it for Moscow’s uncanonical incursion into Greek-claimed Africa.

Our former friend, the former press secretary of the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II and journalist, Sergei Chapnin, who once came to our house, is heading for Constantinople now. We may hear more in the coming days. As the old Russian saying goes: ‘The circus left town, but the clowns stayed behind’.

 

 

Amsterdamned in Kiev?

Robert Amsterdam is a Canadian lawyer, who for nineteen years has been banned from Russia for his defence of an anti-Putin oligarch. The last time he was there, he was nearly arrested before being expelled as a Canadian citizen and told never to come back.

Today he is the legal representative of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, led by Metropolitan Onufry. He has been instrumental in protecting the Church from persecution by Kiev regime atheists. They have been supported by the Biden regime in the USA and its puppets in Constantinople. The latter set up a fake nationalist Church in the Ukraine, which virtually nobody attends.

According to most sources, in 2018 Constantinople was paid $25 million by the US to set up this fake Church, which is a 100% State nationalist organisation, staffed by many fake bishops and clergy, either canonically defrocked or never ordained, sometimes criminals. Their nationalism is such, for example, they have banned Russian saints like St Seraphim of Sarov and St Matrona of Moscow.  As everybody there well knows, Christ was Himself Ukrainian and hated Russians.

This fake Church organisation, supported by Neo-Nazis, is notorious for stealing churches from the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry, beating up its clergy and parishioners, and then locking up the churches, so that nobody can go there. Naturally, it is unrecognised anywhere in the Orthodox world, except by the paid Patriarchate of Constantinople and some dubious bishops, mainly from the Greek nationalist world, which is under Constantinople’s thumb.

The Kiev atheist regime has wanted for quite some time to outlaw the internationally recognised Church of Metr Onufry, defended by the international lawyer, Robert Amsterdam. His efforts have highlighted how ‘democratic Ukraine’ is banning the church. Senator Vance now knows about it and openly speaks about it; he does not want to give any more money to Kiev. Robert Amsterdam’s efforts have also frightened off certain members of the Rada, the Kiev Parliament, who have realised that they cannot violate human rights laws.

Nevertheless, the Kiev regime may move ahead with banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. They imagine that then its 90 or so bishops will all transfer to the fake State Church. Of course, they will not, they would rather go underground. They also imagine that Orthodox priests and people will join the fake Church. Of course, they will not. They would rather stay at home and the churches would be empty, like the 1500 stolen churches already. However, as State officials, they think that the State has power to force people to go to a particular church. This is a sort of State-enforced clericalism, because they will not.

The reason why the Kiev atheist regime wants to ban the real Church and why they set up a fake Neo-Nazi ‘Church’ is because they claim that the real Church is a tool of the enemy, Moscow. The solution is simple. The Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow holds an emergency Synod tomorrow and grants the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry autocephaly (it already has independence). At a stroke, the problem, including the fake Church, would go away, for the Kiev atheist regime’s argument would be like a rug taken from beneath their feet.

Realistically, the likelihood of this is zero. So, in the meantime, the only hope for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev is Robert Amsterdam.

 

 

 

Western Aggression + Russian Naivety = Ukrainian Tragedy + Millennial Transfiguration

Introduction: The End of an Old History

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 should have been a Godsend to the whole world. It should have led to the demilitarisation of the West since, with the fall of its Communist ideological rival, military aggression should have had no more meaning for the Western Capitalist world, if it ever had. Although, at the time, some spoke of ‘the peace dividend’, it became apparent that power had gone to the heads of the Western elite and they actually wanted to implement their ultimate fantasy. This consisted of totalitarian globalist control by the Western elite under the pretence of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to the rest of the world through ‘humanitarian intervention’.

To do this, they would as usual use the organised violence of their ever more bankruptingly expensive military to impose it. They wanted ‘the end of history’ with ‘the global victory of the West’ and its messianic Zionism of ‘freedom and democracy’ (= slavery and tyranny), over all other and much older and far more sophisticated Civilisations. Already, even before the formal fall of the USSR in 1991, the Western elite had decided to invade the oil-rich and gas-rich Muslim world through Iraq. There followed decades of Western massacres of millions in various Muslim countries, which continue today, notably in the genocide in Gaza, with nearly 200,000 civilian dead so far.

Russian Naivety

Meanwhile, however, the pro-Western Russian government was dreaming about a common European home ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’, made richer by demilitarisation. ‘We are Europeans’, claimed the now anti-Communist Russian governing elite. Even after 1999 the ultra-cautious and legalistic lawyer-leader of Russia, the pro-Russian President Putin, continued to want this common European home and even asked to join NATO. Indeed, for nearly three decades after 1991 Russian leaders continued to speak naively of ‘our Western partners’. With Communism removed, why was such idealistic friendship not possible?

However, naïve Russian leaders did not understand the true and envious nature of ambitious Western aggression. From 2008 on, after the West had aggressively declared that the Ukraine and Georgia would also have to join NATO, after already breaking all its promises to Russia not to expand to the whole of ex-Soviet Eastern Europe, Russia at last began to be alarmed. It had lost its post-1945 buffer zone set up to protect it from continual Western invasions. For the first time it resisted and defeated the aggression of the Western puppet government in nationalist Georgia. Relations between the West and Russia sharply deteriorated, requiring an utterly failed ‘reset’.

The situation came to a head in 2014 with the anti-democratic CIA regime-change coup on Russia’s doorstep, in Kiev. Manipulating Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, this Western-financed (it had cost ‘only’ $5 billion, as the US politician Nuland publicly boasted) coup was directed at destroying Russia. The aim was to start a proxy war and invade Russia from a highly militarised and NATO-ised Ukraine, then overthrow the Russian government, break this millennial country up, colonise it and seize its huge mineral wealth, thus surrounding China from the north. This was the dream of the Western elite, as openly expressed by the Pentagon’s think tank, the US Rand Corporation.

Such exploitation had already been tried in the 1990s, disastrous for the impoverished and humiliated Russian people, creating the corrupt class of Russian and Ukrainian (in fact, mainly Israeli) oligarchs. Thus, for eight long years between 2014 and 2022, the CIA-controlled Kiev regime and its US and British PR advisors and arms merchants massacred, persecuted and repressed the large Russian minority (about 40% of the population) in the east and south of the Ukraine, arming the Kiev regime to the teeth. During this time naïve Russia still constantly tried to create peace and negotiate, mainly through the Minsk Accords.

Naivety Rewarded by Western Aggression

In these ‘Accords’ the naïve Russian elite was systematically betrayed and deceived by the West, especially by the German and French leaders, behind whom stood Washington. Slowly, the extremely naïve Russian governing elite began to realise what had been obvious to others all along, that the US would not allow peace and that the Western European vassals were entirely in US pockets and no longer had any policy of their own. When at the end of 2021 it became obvious that the Kiev regime was about to invade and genocide Russian majority areas, in February 2022 a small Russian task force was forced to pre-empt Kiev and enter the east of the Ukraine, formerly Russia.

Numbering some 90,000, but facing the largest and perhaps best-trained, best-equipped and best-fortified army in Europe, that of the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime, this force had as its aim not to occupy, but to withdraw, having forced Kiev into realistic peace talks. However, again Russia was betrayed and lied to. In early April 2022 the US, through its UK subsidiary, forbade peace, even forcing Kiev to pass a law to forbid any negotiations with Moscow. In return, it promised to arm the Kiev regime with all the stocks of Western-held weapons, obsolete or not, it could give it, and to train its troops, if necessary, to ‘die to the last Ukrainian’, so killing as many Russians as possible and weakening Russia.

Thus, the Western elite forced Russia to make its small token operation into an operation against the whole of NATO. This meant the huge growth by voluntary conscription and reprofessionalisation and re-equipping of the Russian armed forces. It also meant the end of reliance on the typically post-Soviet private military Wagner mercenary company, run by the crooked Russian oligarch, Prigozhin, which was the equivalent of the US Blackwater. Much more than this, seeing Western hypocrisy, double standards and intense, Western media Russophobia with its Cancel Russia culture, the pro-Western Russian elite was shocked and even traumatised to its core.

At the height of the Nazis, no-one had ever thought of cancelling Goethe, Hegel, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Heine, Wagner or any other giants of German culture. Russia’s dreamed-of friends have turned into nightmarish enemies, who will not even speak to Russians any more. And the diplomat-free Western elite invented 20,000 illegal anti-Russian sanctions and, as true racists, called its patriotic President ‘Hitler’ (who was a Westerner as was his Fascism also Western) and its people ‘Asiatic barbarians’! Russia was forced to turn away from the hostile and uncivilised West to friendly and civilised China and India, becoming the champion of the anti-Western Global Majority.

From the Ukrainian Tragedy

Gradually, the pre-empting, token Russian Special Military Operation sent in to force negotiations on 24 February 2022, had to turn into another Operation, This had not just to liberate the eastern corner of the Ukraine, with its long-suffering Russian people, and demilitarise and denazify the rest of the Ukraine, but to demilitarise and denazify, that is, disarm and defeat, the whole of NATO. This defeat could well lead to its collapse and the eventual withdrawal of the bankrupt US from Western Europe. However, this in turn will mean the collapse of US world hegemony through the dedollarising, Russian-led BRICS Alliance, liberating Africa, Asia and Latin America from Western tyranny.

These will no longer fear a defeated West with its continual regime-changes of colour revolutions (currently involving Serbia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Armenia, Georgia, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru etc). Some Global Majority countries, especially in French colonial West Africa, have already seen the victory of Russian arms over the West in the Ukraine and liberated themselves in turn from French and US troops. In the end, BRICS may well take with it still relatively free European countries, like Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, perhaps the rest of the Central Europe and the Balkans, and perhaps ultimately Italy and others, thus in time collapsing the US Neo-Nazi EU puppet.

In the last few days, at least 12,000 fanatical Kiev regime troops and many NATO mercenaries, still believing in the recently invented myths of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, have been sent on a fool’s errand by the US/NATO, ostensibly in a terrorist operation which threatens the Kursk nuclear power station, in reality an operation which is guaranteed to fail so that Zelensky can be discredited and replaced. They have been sent as cannon fodder to die in a crazy and suicidal incursion across the Russian border to occupy 40 (not 1,000) square kilometres and a few villages in the south of the province of Kursk. Thus, the last of NATO arms sent in this US-promoted PR stunt to ‘invade Russia’ will be destroyed.

However, these last elite troops, the few trained left, supposed to defend the east of the Ukraine and Kiev itself, have been thrown away together with their German (and British) tanks fighting near Kursk again. All they have achieved is to occupy some fields, forests, hamlets and tiny villages in the vastness of Russia. Now they are running out of logistics, air cover, supplies, ammunition, fuel, food and water. Some 2,600 are already dead or wounded and over 300 of their NATO tanks and armoured cars destroyed. Many Ukrainian soldiers, trapped inside Russia, have surrendered. But Russian public opinion is outraged. ‘Go for Kiev’ is the message they are giving the once moderate Russian government.

To Millennial Transfiguration

Some have even suggested that the whole operation was a Russian trap, set to destroy this last gasp of the collapsing Kiev regime. Some compare the operation to the suicidal Nazi operation in the Ardennes, ‘the Battle of the Bulge’, in December 1944. This may be the end for those currently cowering in their bunker in Kiev. Russia never wanted any of this. But the treacherous trauma of Western aggression since 2014 in Kiev, which has led directly to today’s tragic bloodshed, has also made Russia into the linchpin of BRICS. Thus, it has allied itself with the Global Majority, that is, 90% of the world, the Non-Western world. The Orwellian-censored Western elite has been left sulking.

It has set about trying to assassinate any leader it can, apparently in Slovakia, Hungary, Iran and even regime-changing the USA itself, replacing the senile Biden in a palace coup with the unelected Harris, and trying to assassinate Trump. Its State propaganda mouthpieces call ‘war’ ‘peace’, ‘tyranny’ ‘freedom’, oligarchy’ ‘democracy’, and ‘lies’ ‘truth’. (Orwell was forty years too early, 1984 = 2024). Many have commented that this is a transformation which takes place only every 500 years. The period of exploitation and colonisation of the New Worlds, that is, everywhere outside Western Europe, between 1514 and 2014, from Latin America to Asia, from Africa to the Ukraine, is over.

It is the Ukraine that has been the bridge too far, the fat morsel which the greedy West has bitten off and choked on. However, in reality, this is a millennial transformation. For the West began its ascendancy in Rome when on 14 February 1014, the newly-installed Pope Benedict VIII crowned the centralising and imperialistic Holy Roman Emperor Henry in Rome. This was to the reading of the newly-formed dogma of Western ideology, expressed in the new Roman Catholic Creed, at variance with the age-old Creed of the Church. For Henry II had forced Pope Benedict VIII to include the word filioque in the Nicene Creed agreed on by the whole Church in the fourth century.

This is the proclamation that all authority and infallibility, the Spirit of God, proceeds uniquely from Western leaders, who are the replacements (‘vicars’) of God on earth. This is an ersatz humanist religion, replacing God by men, Faith by religion. Moreover, this authority and infallibility has been passed down to all Western leaders, whoever they may be, whether they have been Popes of Rome (up until the sixteenth century) and Western Kings (up until the revolutions of 1688 in England and 1789 in France), and then Western European Emperors (Napoleon), Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chancellors or, since 1917, US Presidents.

Conclusion: The Beginning of a New History

However, what will happen after the Russian Special Operation in the Ukraine is over? How will Russia, which has no intention of occupying the whole of this Communist construct of the Ukraine, win the peace there? Will there be a new Russia-friendly government in the New Ukraine (will it even be called that?), its capital still in Kiev, but perhaps shorn of between five and nine southern and western provinces, gone back to Russia, and of between three and five provinces in the far west, gone back to Poland, Romania and Hungary? And how will the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church cease after the fall of the now illegal, atheist Jewish dictatorship of Zelensky?

What will the new status of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church then be? Will the naïve Russian Church free itself of its corrupt or CIA bishops? Will the New Ukraine join BRICS, as part of the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus? So many questions remain, for this conflict is only the beginning, not the end, of a new history. What is certain is that this new history will be led and created not by the West, but by the Global Majority, led by Russia and China. The US will be left isolated and the US-appointed EU Commissars, German and UK ministers will, with their Fascist ‘liberal’ globalist ideology, be as discredited as their Nazi grandfathers, and run away into US exile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Eve of Destruction? Prayer or Despair

Introduction

Whether among the secular elite or among the Church elite, corruption, perversion and faithlessness are everywhere, in almost apocalyptic fashion. The Western elite seems to be obsessed with its virtual world delusions which come from its wishful thinking lies, that it calls ‘narratives’, which are psy-ops and propaganda. For example, most Roman Catholics are still stunned by the anti-Christian opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in ex-Catholic and Prime Minister-less France, which is now ‘run’ by perverts. Perhaps they were stunned even more by the silence and eventual half-hearted condemnation of that blasphemy by the Pope of Rome. Some Catholics have even asked if he is not one of them. No comment. It is for Catholics to comment on their own elite.

International

Meanwhile, the US-funded provocations of the Western crusader state of Israel against Iran, with Mossad assassinations of Iranian leaders and friends, now look as though they could lead to a regional war in the powderkeg of West Asia, perhaps in the Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Jews have already fled Israel, whose army with its many deserters, has been mauled by the genocided Palestinians, many hundreds of whose civilians are massacred every single day by Israel’s US bombs. If the leaderless and rudderless US, where the senile Biden has been replaced in a coup d’etat, obsessed with an election next November, directly takes part in this war, it will be on the orders of Washington fanatics, blinded by their ideology.

If so, expect US Navy ships to be sunk. This could be in the eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, where 30% of the world’s oil passes, or in the Red Sea. US ships already had to run away from the Red Sea once, frightened of Houthi missiles. Iran is being armed with air-defence systems and missiles by Russia. The Muslim world, Russia and China are united in support of Iran. Little wonder that stock exchanges amid the political chaos of the Western world have been crashing, not least because they have seen that US debt is unpayable. Printing more trillions of dollars is not an option.

Meanwhile, almost unreported in the Pagan Games-obsessed and media-manipulated Western world of bread and circuses, 2,000 ageing Ukrainian troops are being killed or wounded every day. Despite the  six obsolete US fighter aircraft hiding in Romania, whose futile presence is merely a PR stunt, surely the tragedy there can only last another two months at most?  Moreover, Ukrainians are themselves rebelling against their authorities and the Fascist military pressgangs, who are trying to recruit the over-60s, so desperate is the manpower situation. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are surrendering or deserting every year. The conflict in the Ukraine, with its untrained and surrendering troops, can only end in one way, the unconditional capitulation of Kiev, which for ten years refused to negotiate. In the meantime, Russian forces are heading for the Polish border.

National

In the UK, some minor riots against mass and uncontrolled illegal immigration, wretched refugees from the West’s futile wars in the Middle East, have been taking place in a few of the poorest working-class areas in the north and midlands of England. The anti-working-class British Prime Minister, the Zionist millionaire Starmer, elected by 20% of the population, but with a massive parliamentary majority, can only bluster. His prisons are so full anyway that he has to release thousands of prisoners before term. But then the last two British Prime Ministers were not even elected – such is the inbred elite of British democracy, which is in fact like the EU, a US-appointed globalist autocracy.

Starmer’s utter incompetence is not going to solve any problems, let alone draw up a strategy to deal with decades of accumulated discontent in the oligarch-controlled UK. The future looks grim. Decades of British incompetence and exploitation have produced the destruction of public services and utilities (which now resemble more public disservices), tens of thousands of homeless people sleep rough on the streets, hundreds of thousands of children have to eat from food banks run by charities, amid dangerous potholed roads and polluted rivers. Decay is all around.

Indeed, on top of the failure of the hopelessly underfunded police, defence and education services, there is the utterly failed National Health ‘Disservice’, with nearly 8 million waiting for urgent medical attention. The number goes down only if those waiting for treatment die before they get treatment, as so often happens. Why such social injustice? Partly, because of the tens of billions wasted in futile wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Ukraine, each time without any consultation, and at the British Akrotiri base (run under US orders) in Cyprus, which is used to supply bombs for the ongoing genocide of 200,000 Palestinian civilians and children in Gaza.

Church

In the meantime, on 25th July, the Synod of the Russian Church in Moscow at last began the long, long overdue campaign to cleanse the immoral and amoral members of the episcopate and senior clergy of that Church. First, it suspended the notorious liberal intellectual, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev). At best he can only be retired, like so many other hypocritical metropolitans who ‘let the side down’, like the alcoholic and married Metr Ioan, who once sat in Paris or, much worse, the pedophile metropolitans, two of whom it has already ‘retired’ in Moscow, or those ‘retired’ from Kazan in that disgusting affair.

The suspension of Metr Hilarion followed the long overdue suspension of the Rector of St John the Theologian’s University in Moscow, the notorious Abbot Petr Yeremeev. Now also Archbishop Ephraim of Birobidjan has been ‘retired’. As for Bishop Ignaty (Punin), once very close to the Patriarch, this notorious homosexual thief has at last been defrocked. And in the Crimea Bishop Callinicus, aged 47, has also been ‘retired’. Meanwhile, in London, the defrocked drug dealer ‘Bishop Maxim’, notorious for his sexual orgies even when he was an unpunished priest in London, roams free from the Russian police.

Many will complain and ask when this drop of punishment in the ocean of corruption and perversion will extend to take in all the corrupt and perverted (most of them are the same people). When will it spread to all those hundreds of corrupted and perverted bishops and senior clergy both inside and outside Russia and their gay mafia gangs, whose antics have been known for years or even decades? These gangs are the ones who persecute the honest parish pastors and ignore the people and their basic needs. Yet no action has ever been taken against them and these evil men are still shielded and protected.

Conclusion

The people have been left unprotected for decades, both by secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Both have been and are equally corrupt. May the Church cleansing, which has at last begun, spread to the hundreds who need to be cleansed. And may it spread outside the Russian Church to the utterly corrupt episcopate in Constantinople and elsewhere. And may it finally spread to the political authorities too. Now is the time for prayer. The alternative is despair.

 

Holy Rus in High Suffolk: An Interview with a Russian Count

Over the last fourteen years I have got to know particularly well a couple who are spiritual children and whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. Nobles of Russian extraction, they have made their home in England and chosen to live in the mystical heart of our local East Anglian Orthodox Church and Kingdom. Count (Earl in the English system) Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, agreed to this extensive conversation after I interviewed his wife over a month ago. With his permission we have slightly edited his words, though his English is excellent.

On the table in the oak-beamed living room, where we conduct the interview, stands a golden samovar, bought in St Audrey’s Ely, alongside a portrait of the Tsar’s Family. Nearby stands a lovely vase with a bouquet of fragrant roses, which the Countess has picked from the garden of their thatched farmhouse in High Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. The Countess has served us tea from her favourite Royal Albert service, the doors to the garden wide open before us. Such is the setting for this second conversation, the recording of which stretched on into the lengthening shadows of the English summer evening.

 

Q: Can you please tell us something about your family?

A: In 1775 the Benckendorff family was awarded an estate of 8,000 acres in Sosnovka in the Tambov province of Russia for services to the Crown. After the Revolution most branches of the family, like ours, remained inside the USSR, but we had to change our name for fear of being murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one priestly ancestor is a New Martyr. At first, we remained in Russia, but after 1945 we moved to what had by then become the eastern Ukraine, though that region is now back in Russia again after 100 years of Soviet-imposed exile.

After 1917 one branch settled in England. This was the family of Count Alexander Benckendorff, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain between 1903 and 1917. His family found itself stranded in the White Russian emigration, as Alexander had passed away in January 1917. Unlike his brother Paul, who was very close to Tsar Nicholas in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander was never Orthodox. He had become a Catholic by conviction from Lutheranism and is buried in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral in London.

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

A: In the Ukraine. There I, a Benckendorff, met and married another Benckendorff, though the Countess was previously quite unknown to me and her branch of the family had also assumed another name. Some time ago I worked out that we are eighth cousins. The way we met was quite extraordinary, neither knowing that the other was of Benckendorff descent and yet feeling that we were kindred souls. Both of us were divorced, having made bad marriages when we were far too young, like so many who were brought up in the Soviet Union. The marriages did not last very long and there were no children. Some years after we met, in 2008, we left Russia and settled in the West.

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

A: No, we did not know anything about the ‘English’ branch of the family until five years ago. To our surprise, we discovered that they had lived in south-east Suffolk, very close to where we first lived before we moved here. Their choice was because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Ransomes farm machinery, made in Ipswich, was used on our estate and there were also contacts with the Suffolk Fisons fertiliser company, which later came to own a very large property called Harvest House in Felixstowe.

And so the family story turned full circle. In any case, Suffolk is where we have made our home and we in no way regret it. This is the land of St Edmund, the patron saint of Suffolk and of England, and we fly his flag here. You introduced us to him and to the other local saints. We respect the Local Church and honour the local saints. That is our Orthodox duty. We had thought of calling our Suffolk home ‘Sosnovka’ from the name of our estate, but we agreed that we must be local and so we named it ‘St Edmund’s House’.

Q: What did you study as a young man?

A: In the 90s I studied history at the University of Kiev and then some years later theology at St Tikhon’s University of the Humanities in Moscow. However, I never taught history, because in the 1990s we had to practise commerce in order to survive. We were fortunate in business because of my knowledge of English and French and my wife’s knowledge of German. We did very well. That is how I came to study as a mature student at St Tikhon’s in Moscow and then we moved to the West in 2008 and England in 2010. Nearly six years ago we bought this old farmhouse. Now I still study theology and the history of the Russian Church and I have also written a novel in Russian under a pseudonym. We also breed roses which involves travel to many places, including to Germany. Financially we have been helped by the investments we made in the past.

Q: As you know, I come from the Suffolk-Essex border where the dry and sunny climate and the soil are ideal for seed growing, which was my father’s profession. He was a sweet pea expert and even has a sweet pea named after him. How did you come to breed roses and not, for example, sweet peas?

A: Like you, Fr Andrew, we love sweet peas, also lilac and many other flowers and shrubs, but both of us have always loved roses more, already in the Ukraine, where in the east the black earth is so fertile and the climate is so good. Some twenty years ago my wife fell in love with roses in a monastery there, where she had the obedience from her spiritual father of maintaining the monastery rose garden. A huge variety of roses is available in Russia and the Ukraine with sturdier stems than in England, even though you have David Austen roses. One of our favourite roses is ‘Zephyr’ from Turchinov. We also love lilacs and again there is a Russian lilac called ‘Beauty of Moscow’. We are introducing Russian roses, lilacs and others into England. This seems to be our mission!

Strangely enough, we discovered that my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, the ambassador Alexander Konstantinovich, and his wife, Sofia Petrovna, who was a Tolstoy, also grew roses. Then their grand-daughter, Natalia Konstantinovna, who passed away only in 2018, grew them. Her husband, Thomas Humphrey Brooke, who was a friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, became an internationally acknowledged expert on roses. He was a close friend of the rosarian Peter Beales at his gardens in Attleborough in Norfolk. Humphrey cultivated over 500 varieties of rose. I know Peter Beales’ son, who has just retired. Roses must be in the Benckendorff genes.

Q: Let us turn to Church matters now. As you follow Church affairs very closely, you know much about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople on account of the Ukraine. Do you see a way out of this?

A: There is always a way out. It is called repentance, the antidote to despair, the antidote that Judas did not take. Beware, he did not take the antidote and hanged himself. What must be done to undo this schism is to work in reverse. This means going back to what caused the schism and reversing it. This means that Constantinople must abandon its pretensions to the territory of the Russian Church in the ex-Soviet Union. These pretensions were formed because the Patriarchate of Moscow refused to grant anyone outside the Russian Federation autocephaly and because Washington paid Constantinople to commit the crime of setting up a fake Church in the Ukraine. Still, if Moscow had given the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly years ago, creating a national Church there, Constantinople would never have meddled, because the Ukrainians would have been satisfied already.

Next, or preferably before that, Moscow must immediately stop its schism with Constantinople, start concelebrating and abandon its excommunications and defrockings, freeing people to act according to their conscience. The schism was quite unnecessary and just brought Moscow into exactly the same isolation and disrepute as Constantinople, losing it all sympathy. Two wrongs do not make a right. How do you say that in English, when both are equally guilty? There is an expression with six and six in it.

Q: Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

A: Yes, that’s it. Anyway, Moscow must also negotiate a canonical solution to the African problem. Either Africa belongs canonically to the Patriarchate of Alexandria or to Moscow, or else the territory must be divided and different geographical regions will belong to one or the other. For example, Egypt, or even all Muslim North Africa, could remain under Alexandria and Moscow could take Black Africa, where it has a lot of political support, though only if it is prepared to set up a real, local, independent African Orthodox Church. You cannot have overlapping jurisdictions on the same territory. We must support the canonical order of the Church internationally.

Q: Is this realistic? Look at the Diasporas, where we have had overlapping jurisdictions for over a century.

A: Things are changing. Look, the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine will be over soon. The Kiev regime is collapsing. Some even say it will all be over for the Dormition, on 28th August. Perhaps not so soon. In any case, the USA is giving up on its Fascist friends in the Ukraine, who have failed. Americans hate failure. What is the way out? One way is if Trump, who is already the real President – some even say that Biden is literally, not just metaphorically, dead – could perhaps denounce the whole Ukraine project. He could say that it was all a fantasy of Biden, ‘Genocide Joe’, as they call him.

Trump must abandon the fake OCU Church that Constantinople set up in the Ukraine with US dollars, denouncing it as created by those who deceived him in Washington in 2018. President Putin will make the freedom of the Church a condition for peace anyway. The Church must be free from the persecution of the OCU, which must return the thousands of churches it has stolen. Trump must give up the illegal sanctions against Russia, release frozen Russian assets and return the stolen interest on those assets.

In this way President Trump can get a photo opportunity of the Two Presidents. He will be shaking hands with President Putin in Moscow (Trump loves having his photo taken) as the great hero, peacemaker and dealmaker, unlike Biden the warmaker and failure. Why, Trump could get a Nobel Prize – those prizes are funded by the CIA anyway, as we saw with Solzhenitsyn. Trump and Moscow can sign an agreement, stating that Washington has no claims to the Ukraine and that Moscow has no claims to the Baltics, Finland, Poland, Romania, or anywhere else west of the Ukraine. This will be historic, but should all have been done 33 years ago in 1991.

Q: What about Moldova?

A: This agreement would include Moldova, unless some minorities who live there along the border with the New Ukraine or Russia vote by democratic referendum to transfer, for example, the Transdnistrians and the Gagauzians. Most of Moldova will eventually go back to Romania. It is historically inevitable. The Patriarchate in Moscow has lost the loyalty of most Moldovans through its centralising racism and many there are already joining the Romanian Church.

Such a deal of the Two Presidents would give both Russia and Western Europe security, making NATO entirely redundant, which is what both President Trump and President Putin want. Such a new security agreement for Europe could be presented as a triumph for Trump (the Americans are experts at PR) and Moscow will be fully satisfied. Russia will set up the third Union State in the New Ukraine, which will be a second Belarus, perhaps also landlocked, as all the south and east of the old Ukraine, which are Russian, as I know, may well rejoin Russia. The Ukraine will be demilitarised and denazified, as Moscow needs. With such a deal both sides will save money and, above all, both will save lives.

Q: Do you think the New Ukraine will retain the western borders of Stalin’s Ukraine?

A: Moscow may well give some extreme western parts of Stalin’s Ukraine, for Stalin’s borders are what Biden and the EU Commissars have been fighting for, back to Poland, Romania and especially to Hungary, our ally. This would be seen as a great victory for the USA and as a great victory for Russia, though it would not be a victory for the Western European elite. But that elite does not count for anything internationally and can be ignored. Moscow negotiates only with Trump, neither with the sick old man before Trump, nor with the Western European puppies who lie and cheat.

With peace in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate in Moscow will also have to negotiate a new relationship with the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, under which I began my Orthodox life. And probably also a new relationship with other parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. Otherwise, Moscow will lose everything there too. A wave of autocephalies must follow. The age of Soviet central planning is over. It was over with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, only the Church authorities did not keep up with changing times.

Q: Why do you say that this will not be a victory for the Western European elite?

A: The Western European political elite, its ruling class, has for eighty years been living off the USA, licking its heels and barking when told to. It has become dependent on the USA, not only a drug-addict enslaved to the USA, but also a vampire that sucks its blood. As in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, that elite does not want freedom. But Western Europe is a very expensive slave to keep and the now bankrupt USA can no longer afford it, just as one day it will no longer be able to afford to keep its other vassals, Israel, Japan and South Korea.

The American Empire is like the Roman Empire which in the early fifth century could not afford to keep Britain and had to abandon it. Western Europe will have to find its own way, control its own destiny, defend itself. Actually, it will be able to slash its futile military spending once the new security agreement or non-aggression pact with Russia has been signed. That is also what Russia wants. It is tired of being invaded by the West.

Today the USA is letting go of Western Europe. This means the UK and the EU, minus Hungary, Slovakia, others like Serbia and maybe later many more like Romania, Greece, and perhaps even Italy. The first three have already more or less negotiated their way out of the EU into BRICS. Freedom from the USA will undermine the parasitic globalist Western European elite of puppies and puppets, banksters and gangsters, unprincipled and hypocritical pawns all of them. They backed the Kiev Nazis even to their own detriment, allowing prices for their peoples to double and letting the Americans blow up the Nordstream pipeline.

That ruling class of perverts will have to resign, if they are not first voted out, or better arrested, because they no longer have the protection of Trump’s Washington. The Western European swamp will be drained. That is why they and their globalist media propagandists like the BBC feel betrayed and hate Trump. As a result of all this, we shall at last see new Western European rulers, hopefully far more respectful of the wishes of the native peoples of Western Europe. Then can be abandoned those satanic and blasphemous pagan festivals like Eurovision and the 33rd Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which openly mocked Christ, Who was crucified when He was 33. No wonder French cathedrals burn down. If that is Western Civilisation, then there is nothing left to defend.

All these countries can then be at peace with the eastern half of Europe, comprised of Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus. Importantly, this eastern half stretches on into North Asia, to the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Russia is the gateway to Asia, the future, where three of the world’s four largest economies thrive. We are at last seeing the Gaullist vision of a natural unity which stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Western Europe will no longer be unnaturally cut off, but will rejoin the whole of Asia, of which it is only a north-western peninsula.

All this is possible, though if and when it happens is another story. It may all take many years and I trust more in Vance than in Trump. These are just my thoughts and hopes. We shall see.

Q: Will England take part in this New Western Europe, which will at last become a real part of Eurasia, which geographically it always has been?

A: Ah, dear old England. A good question. I really hope so. If the USA rejects England, it will have to leave the USA. It will not be the fifty-first State of the USA. And with the very fragile, violent and divisive situation in the present fifty States with their 35 trillion dollars of debt, that is not an enviable position to be in. I think England should ally itself with the new, post-American, Eurasian Europe of the BRICS Alliance. Ireland, Scotland and Wales surely will. May St Edmund and the English saints guide England towards this.

But for England to become sovereign again, the oppressive British Establishment ruling class will first have to be removed, with its private elite schools, Oxbridge, Westminster, BBC, Financial Times, Economist, tabloid press like the Guardian, the Telegraph, all those other Daily State propaganda mouthpieces, and the Blairs, Camerons, Sunaks and Starmers. As you have very often written, Father, that elite is alien, not Norman by blood, but Norman by mentality, spiritually Norman, made up of spiritual invaders.

Q: We have got into political affairs. To come back to our question, what in your view was the essential error behind the Greek-Russian schism?

A: Lack of communion. It is vital to remain in communion with everyone. It is a great, great sin to break communion, because if you do this, you cause division in the Church. And the Moscow bureaucrats who surround the Patriarch committed this sin, weaponising communion. And look where they are now: isolated, feared, unloved and scandal-ridden. It is all so Soviet. They have lost all their best friends – they even lost you, Father, who spent all your life fighting for communion and the reintegration of the Russian Church.

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

A: It is always because they want more power. And what do they do once they have power? They introduce novelties in order to justify themselves. This was exactly the case of Rome in the eleventh century. All the innovations they introduced after they had broken off communion from the Church were self-justification for breaking communion. And self-justification is the opposite of repentance.

A thousand years on and the Popes of Rome and the Vatican machine have still not repented, still claiming to be rulers of the Christian world, and so they are still out of communion with us, who follow the principle of the Local, which is the principle of Catholicity. They instead imposed the Centre, that is, Rome. Can you imagine, they tried to impose their barbarous Latin on the descendants of the Civilisations of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs! No respect for the Local!

We must be very strict about keeping in communion. The way back, the return, is in respecting the canonical territories of each Local Church. That is what Rome did not do and instead tried to impose itself by the sword on Orthodox territories, with their crusades, inquisitions and so on. Now Constantinople is trying to do the same, imposing centralisation in imitation of Papism. And Moscow Church bureaucrats tried to do the same, but God has intervened, its Soviet Empire over Non-Russians is crumbling.

Q: I would like to come back to my original question, which we did not answer. Do these considerations give us a solution to the divisions in the Diasporas, where there have been several overlapping jurisdictions for over a century?

A: In the Diasporas, where there are mixed Orthodox populations, responsibility for organising new Local Churches lies with the majority ethnic group, but that majority must respect all the customs of the minorities. This is what Bishop Tikhon, the future Russian Patriarch and Saint, did when he headed the multinational Northern American Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Then Carpatho-Russians and Russian-converted Alaskans were the majority, but minorities like the Syrians, Serbs and others were together with them.

Today the Greeks are the Orthodox majority there, as also in Australia, but unity is blocked because of the political and imperialist style of the Greeks. As long as they have that Hellenist style, unity will be impossible. Only when the Greeks have a Non-Greek Patriarch, will they be taken seriously. As regards Western Europe the Romanians are the majority. Here I am hopeful, because respect is what our Romanian Metropolitan Joseph gave our Russian and Moldovan parishes with our calendar, languages and customs, when we had to flee to his canonical protection from pseudo-Russian episcopal persecution. And we in turn greatly respect and love the Romanians. I love their singing and their simplicity! Mutual respect is vital.

Q: One well-known Russian Metropolitan said that the Moscow-Constantinople schism is as big and as permanent as the 1054 Western Schism. What do you think?

A: That was nonsense. This schism is all about personalities and they are temporary. Here today, gone tomorrow, as you say in English. Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople has renounced or changed the Creed, unlike Rome in 1054. So this schism is not at all on the same level as 1054, it is not a dogmatic issue, but a vulgar issue of territory and personalities. And personalities change and are replaced. In any case, the Metropolitan-oligarch who said that, the bureaucrat was in part responsible for the whole fiasco, is now suspended and completely discredited. Nobody is listening to him any more. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Can other Local Churches play a role in healing the Moscow-Constantinople schism?

A: Of course, and a vital role. The Churches of Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland and perhaps others like Antioch, Czechoslovakia and America, and of course the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry in the Ukraine, will play a vital role. Even some bishops in Greece and Cyprus are sufficiently non-racist to understand the reality. Some Local Churches are already playing that role, stressing the Conciliar principle, the principle of Sobornost, that is, Catholicity, which, by the way, is the exact opposite of Catholicism and it is precisely the spirit of Catholicism, that is Papism, which caused the schism. Read the interview with the new Bulgarian Patriarch, who was elected after the American candidate lost and was humiliated and the Greeks had to go home like whipped dogs. His words are inspired.

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

A: Not personally, only by sight, but I do know Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Archbishop Diodor quite well and they have the same spirit. The further you are from Moscow, the more you find that spirit.

Q: You mention that the essence of the schism is the lust for power on the part of bishops and the spirit of Catholicism or Papism which lies behind it. Can you expand on this?

A: We are all waiting for the restoration of canonical order in the Russian Church, but this cannot happen until the end of what some Russians call ‘Philocatholicism’. This means the fawning admiration by some Russian bishops of the Vatican power-structure, which is the concept of a Church-State, a Church which is a State, or is even more powerful than a State, as history saw at Canossa. However, I am completely against this word because I respect ordinary Catholics, who are Catholics only because they were born in a certain country and I would never insult or disrespect them. The disease inside the Russian Church is not Philocatholicism, the disease is ‘Philopapism’. That is the real heart of the issue, And, by the way, it has nothing to do with ecumenism. Some of the worst Philopapists are anti-ecumenist.

Q: In that case, can you define ‘Philopapism’ for us?

A: Yes, but first understand that Philopapism is not just a Russian disease, it has long infected Constantinople, where it is called ‘Eastern Papism’, and before that it infected Rome, where it has always been called Papism. In Rome the problem was and is Western nationalism, in Constantinople it is Greek nationalism and in Moscow it is Russian nationalism. In Russia, it is not at all a recent Soviet disease, ‘Sergianism’, unlike as some very politicised, anti-Communist emigres used to imagine, it goes back centuries in Russia too, long before Communism.

It existed, for example, just before the Revolution in the awful persecution of the so-called ‘Name of God’ monks on Mt Athos. It was Tsar Nicholas who stopped that persecution, which had been instigated by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), who later became the first leader of the émigré ROCOR. The persecution was carried out by bureaucrats who were more or less atheists. The First World War followed it. And most of those very same bishops who had persecuted simple piety, then abandoned Tsar Nicholas at the Revolution and even rejoiced at his overthrow. Later they had to repent, redeeming themselves at the price of martyrdom or of exile. They had to pay the price for their earlier vile persecution.

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

A: The post-Revolutionary bout of Philopapism goes back to Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Sergius, who wanted to ‘save the Church’, just like the Popes and the recent Patriarchs of Constantinople. How can you ‘save the Church’? Christ is the Saviour! The Church does not need saving, it is we, including bishops and patriarchs, who need saving. Who do they think they are? The problem is that the Philopapists see the Church as a purely worldly organisation, just like the Popes of Rome, who used to lead armies in order to defend their Church. In order to defeat the barbarians, they themselves became barbarians! Who then was the gentleman?! From Patriarch Sergius this infection spread down to personalities like Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who characteristically died in the arms of the Pope. Some say that he was a secret cardinal. Maybe. That is not the point. From him the disease has contaminated further to this day.

This disease is the mentality that bishops are ‘princes of the Church’, in fact they are perverted oligarchs, just like the Borgias in Renaissance Rome. This is poisonous. It is why I refused to go to many churches when I lived in the Ukraine and Russia. They were an immoral business operation and many bishops there are immoral, chosen only because they know how to make money, not because they believe in God, pray, or are monks. I think many of these new Russian Borgias should go to prison. The current Metropolitan Hilarion affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Others must be trembling now too. The truth is coming out and judgement is coming to them all.

Q: You said that Philopapism goes back centuries in Russia. When did Philopapism begin?

A: It came in after the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, in 1453. So began the idea of the Third Rome. Fighting against St Nil of Sora and the hesychast Non-Possessors – St Sergius of Radonezh had been one of them earlier on – the situation came to a head at the so-called ‘Raskol’, that is, the Old Ritualist schism 200 years later. Then the administrative centre of the Russian Church in Moscow was contaminated by Philopapism, which was also encouraged by the idea of the Third Rome, which maintains that Russia has a messianic mission. Russia does have a mission, but it takes place within the multilateral Alliance of Civilisations, which is what BRICS is about.

In other words, Philopapists think that Russia is exceptional, indispensable to the world and therefore anything its rulers do is justified. The antidote to this was in the concept of Moscow as a Second Jerusalem, but that option was cruelly rejected by the Moscow bureaucrats. It is not that I am in favour of Old Ritualism, which was a form of ignorant nationalism, but I am against persecution. What difference is there between the State persecution of the Old Ritualists in the seventeenth century and the State persecution of Orthodox in the twentieth century?

The Philopapist mentality creates pharisees and ‘high priests’, as Christ called them in the Gospel, those who like ‘the first places at table’. Philopapists consider that they are the chosen people and so above the law, above the canons, ‘exceptional’. But this mentality is why the pharisees crucified Christ, Who called them to order, what we call canonical order, and told them that our Kingdom is not of this world. He overturned the tables of these new moneychangers, which is what you did, Fr Andrew, when you chased out the new pharisees who were threatening you and screaming at you in 2021 and 2022. All those who persecuted you are one by one being removed. Bishops are not above the canons.

It is the Holy Spirit Who chooses us for mission, not pharisees. Pharisees think only in worldly terms of money and power, and camouflage themselves with messianism as self-justification for their lusts. It is simply lust for money and power that contaminates these people. Once they have money, they want power. It is always the same old sordid story of corruption and perversion. That is Philopapism.

Q: But Phariseeism itself is universal, isn’t it?

A: Yes, of course. It was this same missionary, messianic mentality which inspired the atheist Jew Bronstein-Trotsky, who wanted to spread the Communism of the Third International (which replaced the Third Rome) worldwide. He also persecuted, leading the Red Army and causing the deaths of millions. But it is not only Jewish, it can be Frankish, Norman, Venetian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, Soviet, American, or anything else.

For instance, Soviet messianism strangely resembles American messianism. This is because the struggle between Washington and Moscow is in fact the struggle between the First Rome and the Third Rome, for the USA is the heir to the infallible Popes of the First Rome. ‘We are the exceptional people, the indispensable nation’, the infallible US have been saying of themselves ever since the collapse of the SU (Soviet Union), though its collapse had nothing to do with the Americans. (See how even the initials US and SU and their symbols, the white star and the red star, are the same, just the other way round).

Communism collapsed because it is unrealisable and went bankrupt. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union went to the heads of the US elite. They claimed absurdly: ‘This is the end of history and we have won. As the victors, we can set up a World Empire, called Globalism, we have exceptional authority, therefore no laws apply to us, we can carry out genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya and Syria, in the Donbass and Gaza, we can ignore the International Criminal Court. We can do whatever we want’. In reality, this is just the same vulgar old imperialism, absolutism, immorality, cloaked in their smug Protestant self-righteousness and infallibility. It is Philopapism.

In reality only God is exceptional. No human being or country is exceptional.

Q: What do you think of what some call the ‘liberal opposition’ in the Russian Church, clergymen like Protodeacon Andrey Kuraev and the popular pastor Fr Alexei Usminsky? They are also opposed to these Vatican-adoring, ‘money and power’ Russian bishops, the pharisaic Philopapists, as you are.

A: The dissident liberals are opposed to the Philopapists, but not for the same reasons as I am. The liberals are opposed to such bishops because the liberals are in reality rationalistic and modernistic Protestants. Like all Protestants, they are naturally anti-Catholic, anti-Papist. However, like all Protestants they are also generally pro-Western and some are traitors to Russia, just like their corrupt enemies whom they fight and are also traitors to Russia (I make exceptions for some who are just extremely naïve and not very intelligent). We disagree with the liberals because we are not Protestants and we follow the historic Orthodox Faith.

We are not traitors, we are patriots of Russia, that is, of the real Russia, of Orthodox Rus. President Putin is preparing the way for that, for the coming Emperor. He took on not just Paris and Berlin, but the whole West and won. We hope that God gives him time to help cleanse the Church next.

However, I do disagree with the appalling way that the liberals have been treated, with their so-called ‘defrockings’ by the selfsame corrupt bishops. You cannot defrock a clergyman because he has different political views from his bishop under the absurd pretext that he is being ‘disobedient’. The threat of defrocking forced them and many others, in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Spain, USA and in Russia into joining Constantinople – they had no alternative. This is yet another example of the Moscow bureaucracy weaponising a sacrament, this time not the eucharist, but the priesthood. But grace is given by the Holy Spirit, not by pieces of paper signed by jealous or wicked bishops. Thank God, Patriarch Kyrill is beginning to remove them, suspend them or retire them. He has  a lot of work to do.

Q: How is authentic Orthodox missionary work different from American missionary work?

A: If you have a missionary message to spread to others, the message of Christ, then you do not spread it by violence and threats. This is what the ‘Roman Union’ of the Vatican did. This is what the ‘Soviet Union’ did. Now this is what the ‘American Union’ (which is USA and NATO – basically the ‘European Union’) does. They have all used violence and threats. This has guaranteed the downfall of all of them. It is what is happening now.

The American Union, usually called ‘The West’, is collapsing, it too has gone bankrupt. They have done it to themselves, just like the Soviet Union. As someone from the Soviet Union, I can see very clearly how the European Union has become the same. The commissars, mentality and lies of its politicians and journalists are exactly the same. But the Godless are always defeated because they are all from Babylon. Their Tower always collapses.

Authentic Orthodox missionary work does not use violence and threats. I have recently discovered the Russian saint, German of Alaska as an example. What a great monk! And how he has been ignored by Church authorities and was resisted by Russian State authorities (long before ‘Sergianism’!). He is unknown in Russia. St German lived among the Inuit people ‘as one of them’. Not even a priest, he did not impose his language or customs by violence or threats against the people. He did not try and steal their property. He was their servant and defender, not their persecutor or a ‘prince of the Church’. He was the real Apostle of Alaska. He was able to convert people, because he was Christlike.

In this he was just like Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, St Stephen of Perm, Apostle of the Zyrians, St Nicholas, Apostle of Japan, or St Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, he respected others. That is the problem of the Moscow Patriarchal bureaucrats today, lack of respect for others, for the Local. And that is why they are losing everything, they put politics above the Church. If I may paraphrase St Matthew’s Gospel: Seek ye first the kingdom of man, and all these things will be taken from you’. They do not deserve to keep it. God will take it away from them because they are unworthy, just as He took Constantinople away from the Greeks in 1453 because of their racism. St German of Alaska’s way is the only way that Russia could convert the world and in no other way. Any other way is Philopapist.

Q: Whenever we talk, I feel nostalgic, as though I am talking to one of the old Russian emigres I knew in the 1970s, like my godfather, Nikolai Zernov. I would sit in his apartment in Northmoor Road in Oxford and look at the huge picture, almost fresco, he had of the Kremlin ‘before the deluge’, as he called it. Then there were Princess Kutaissova, Elizabeth Lopukhina, Dimitri Obolensky, Nadezhda Gorodetskaja or Lydia Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. They all had the same mentality. Why is this?

A: This is because we are Russian emigres like them! But I take your remark as a compliment. All I can say is that though we lived in the Soviet Union, we always kept our family traditions from before. Above all, we never, never accepted any Sovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has increased this Philopapist corruption and perversion today. This has made it and those who are too closely allied with it, like those crazy ROCOR Protestant converts in New York, into pariahs. It is so sad and so unnecessary. They have painted themselves into the corner with their notorious scandals, as you say. Now they are complaining because the rest of the Church at best ignores them and at worst openly mocks them. But how else are you going to treat psychopaths?

Q: Do you have any words of hope for our readers?

A: Yes, there is one thing. You know, I never used to like Trump. I thought he was a clown as well as a criminal and a narcissist. He was also a Russophobe and armed the Neo-Nazis against us and sanctioned us. But recently, he said something very Orthodox, no doubt for the first time in his life and without knowing it. He said: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! I even wanted to buy a picture of this moment, but my wife stopped me. She has no interest in politics and says it is all a waste of time. She prefers gardening and our two cats to politics. She says cats are far more intelligent than politicians.

She may be right, she so often is. But I still maintain that the concept of ‘Never surrender’ is Orthodox, because Christ never surrendered. If He had surrendered, there would never have been the Resurrection. So I say that Trump was saved for a purpose by the grace of God, the bullet missed him, but hit Biden instead and stopped World War III, and we should all repeat: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! Another American said something like: ‘Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world do change the world’. This is in fact the definition of our fools for Christ. They change the world, corrupt and perverted bishops do not. Why, they cannot even change themselves.

July 2024

 

 

Senator J D Vance: A Question to the Russian Orthodox Church

A member of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), between 1974 and 1977 I studied in Oxford under the ever-memorable Metr Kallistos (Ware), then taught in Greece and went on to study at the St Sergius Institute of Theology in Paris. In January 1981 I was tonsured reader by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh (ROC) at the Dormition Cathedral in London. In December 1991, after a decade in which I discovered bishops with mistresses and bishop-freemasons, I was ordained priest by a bishop of integrity. This was the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the successor of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. This ordination followed seven years of service as a deacon in the Russian Orthodox Church. I served faithfully and without recompense as a priest for thirty years, in France, in Portugal, setting up the first ever Russian parish there, and in England.

In May 2012 I was awarded my first jewelled cross in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow by His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. This was for my efforts in helping to bring the very small, New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) back into communion with the ROC Mother Church and fighting against the American sectarianism which had infected it in the USA. I believe that this was very much in accord with what would have been the wishes of St John and Archbishop Antony. In July 2018 I had the privilege of being in Ekaterinburg on the night of the 100th anniversary of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, his August Family and faithful servants, together with the Russian Patriarch and a host of other clergy. Then at midnight I walked the 13 miles together with 120,000 other Russian Orthodox faithful to Ganina Yama, the place where the atheists had first tried to bury the Imperial Martyrs and their servants.

On 10 April 2021, a new and highly controversial ROCOR bishop in London, a young American neophyte who had not long been a clergyman of ROCOR, was not educated in a seminary and was pastorally very inexperienced, publicly declared his intention to break communion with other Orthodox Churches. This included with the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – the ROC is over 130 times larger than ROCOR. His unilateral decision came because he no longer accepted the age-old practice of the ROC of not receiving Catholic priests and people into the Church by rebaptism, but by confession and communion. He also told his laypeople that they could no longer take communion in that part of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), where we have had close family members and friends since the 1970s, because they had followed the traditional ROC practice. Thus, ROCOR created a schism with the Mother-Church.

For us this was the imposition of Lutheran-style sectarianism and an attack on canonicity, experience and practice. Excommunication, dividing faithful Russian Orthodox into two separate groups, was unacceptable to us who had strived so long for unity. We are Orthodox Christians, not Donatist schismatics. As we had no desire to belong to a right-wing American sect which is what ROCOR had become, we carefully discussed what our canonical path would be and made discreet enquiries. Finally, after disappointment with the response of the ROC, on 16 February 2022, after four hours of negotiations with the Romanian Orthodox Church involving the chief canonical adviser of His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel, our deanery of twelve clergy, six parishes and church buildings, some 5,000 people, 99.5% of those who had sought canonical refuge, were received into the local Romanian Metropolia, which is three times larger than the whole of ROCOR.

Our theological conscience was unable to agree to being part of a schism. Thus, we entered with joy into the four-million strong Synod of eight bishops under Metropolitan Joseph (Pop) of Western and Southern Europe of the Patriarchate of Romania. It seems then that the ROC wishes to abandon its centuries-old practice of receiving Non-Orthodox by chrismation, or confession and communion, that is, by economy. This was the case of the future martyrs, Tsarina Alexandra and Grand Duchess Elizabeth, received by the future St John of Kronstadt by chrismation. More recently, in the 1970s both Metr Antony of Sourozh (ROC) and the now St Sophrony the Athonite (Patriarchate of Constantinople), both of whom I knew well, publicly rejected the reception of Non-Orthodox into the Orthodox Church by rebaptism. It seems to us that the denial of this issue of principle preceded the catastrophe of the ROC that befell it eight days later.

For within eight days of our transfer to the Romanian Orthodox Church, the ROC fell into the pastoral disaster of multiple divisions in countries outside the Russian Federation, as the conflict in the Ukraine began. At a time when the probably future President of the USA has chosen a conscious Catholic, Senator J D Vance, a man close to the Orthodox Faith, as his running mate, therefore the probable future Vice-President and possibly the succeeding President of the USA in 2028, this is serious. Senator Vance is a friend of the ROC and has openly stated that the Ukraine must make peace with Russia, returning Russian territory to the Russian Federation. This Catholic Senator has denounced the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry by the Kiev regime and also appears to support the dissolution of NATO. Does the Russian Orthodox Church want Senator Vance to believe that it considers that Catholics are unbaptised?