First there was the US puppet regime in Georgia which tried to invade Russia in 2008. Then there was the US attempt to bomb Syria in 2013. Then the US overthrew the democratically-elected government in Kiev and replaced it with a puppet-oligarch. Then there was the US attempt to set up a NATO base in Sebastopol. Then came the shooting down of an airliner by the Kiev regime, so that it could be blamed on the Ukrainian freedom-fighters. Then came anti-Russian Western sanctions and NATO ‘exercises’ off the Russian coast in the Baltic. This was followed by the US attempt to destroy the Russian economy by halving the oil price and so bring about ‘regime-change’ in Russia, just as they did in Kiev. Then NATO troops and tanks entered Romania. Then they started to prepare coloured revolutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
The British Minister of Defence, following his idol Obama, compared ‘the Russian threat’ to that of the Western-founded IS. Then came the decision by the US-appointed Patriarch of Constantinople to create an ‘alternative Synod’ in the Czechoslovak Church and his promise to establish a ‘united’ Church in the Ukraine, which he now claims to be his canonical territory, like Estonia. Then US and UK troops paraded in Estonia 300 metres from the Russian border. Now comes the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, which bears all the hallmarks of the CIA, just as the assassination of the British spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 bore all the marks of a British assassination. Western intelligence agencies are expending their assets.
What was unthinkable five years ago has happened. The West has declared war on Russia. The announcement by Cameron, a Washington poodle like Blair before him, that he has sent British armoured cars to Kiev and is sending British military advisers to Kiev also puts us Orthodox in England in a difficult position. Anti-Russian hysteria in the UK has begun, drummed up by the State-run media, such as the BBC. Two of our families have already returned to Russia. One Russian Orthodox priest, an Englishman, received a death threat ten days ago. Yesterday a young man, an Englishman, asked me what he should do if the war becomes even more open, explaining that he did not want to find himself ‘on the wrong side of the border’.
Questions arise: Do we continue to pray for the civil powers and the armed forces? Yes, of course we do. To pray for the government and the armed forces in no way means that we agree with them. Indeed, we should pray for them all the more at this time, since our prayers for them may prevent evil. In any case we have to pray for our enemies. Should we prepare to leave the West for Rus, so we do not find ourselves ‘on the wrong side of the border’? If we are single, Russian-speaking and free of attachments – yes, the time has come to prepare an escape route, if it is necessary. But the rest of us must stay here and fight as witnesses to the Orthodox Truth.
I will not abandon my family and my parishioners. I will not abandon the minority in the Western world who are favourable to us, those who have seen through the EU and the US and look to Russia with hope. The time has not yet come when Russian Orthodox may have to be apply to the Russian Embassy in London for refugee status or be rescued by Federation submarine off the coasts of England. For now we stay and fight. We are not cowards. What is the worst that Eurosodom can do to us? Imprison us? Assassinate us? So what? We fear nobody because we do not fear death: I shall not die, but live, and make known the works of the Lord!
The Triumph of Orthodoxy 2015