I have always maintained that the Russian State will be the great winner in the Ukraine, but that the great loser will be the Russian Church. This is because it is not run by monks and pastors, by nuns and faithful, but, instead, by bureaucrats and politicians, by ‘effective managers’ (before the Revolution they were contemptuously called ‘good administrators’), or as they say here now, by ‘lanyard bishops’. Money, power and lust are the three temptations for such, as they always have been.

After the beak-up of the Russian Empire in 1917, Orthodox in Finland, Poland and Czechoslovakia found their Church structures subject to Constantinople interference. Eventually, at least in Poland and Czechoslovakia, Orthodox received Autocephalous Churches. After the USSR broke up into 15 independent republics in 1991, a wave of matching autocephalies on the part of the Russian Church in Moscow would have forestalled Constantinople’s similar schismatic interference in several ex-Soviet republics.

That interference came among Orthodox in Estonia (1994), the Ukraine (2018), and, since 2022, in Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, the Diaspora, from where the Russian Patriarch and most of his bishops are banned, and to a lesser extent in Belarus and Central Asia, The Russian Church has missed the train, shooting itself in the foot by holding on to Soviet centralism. It has all been suicidal. The Russian Church has abandoned Non-Russians. It has gone from being a multinational Church to essentially a mononational Church.

The old Russian émigré Church, in which I was brought up, was multinational because its members were never going to return, or go, to Russia. Metr Antony of Sourozh, who tonsured me reader nearly 46 years ago, would never have accepted this nationalisation, the closing-off of the Russian Church to Non-Russians, nor would have St John of Shanghai and his successors, who ordained me. Nor would any of the best representatives of the Russian emigration. If it were possible to spin in your grave, they would be doing so.

Speaking to Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova in Chisinau today, he told me that he has now lost 300 parishes in Moldova to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Nobody ever returns to him. Some believe that he will find himself completely abandoned by his flock, with his remaining hundreds of others parishes leaving very quickly for the Romanian Church. He has publicly said so. The situation has been made far worse because in the Diaspora hundreds of thousands of Moldovan Orthodox are turned away by the Russian Church and are forced to go to the Romanian Church. He is betrayed by Moscow.

This is just like the Ukrainian Church, which has opened over 100 parishes in Western Europe in the last two years. As one senior Russian Metropolitan said to us in 2022, after 47 years of loyalty to the Russian Church, despite all the persecution there: ‘If you go to the Romanian Church, too bad for you’. This is the new Russian Church attitude to Non-Russians. It is not only racist, it displays incredible pride. With these words that young man renounced the whole missionary heritage of the canonical Russian Church between 1922 and 2022 and maligned the Catholicity of the Church.