strategic-culture | The Kiev Nazi junta is taking decisive steps to eradicate every vestige of Russian Orthodox heritage on the territory it still controls. Besides the already outlawed Russian language, religious institutions are also a principal target. Over the last two months, as the regime’s prospects have turned increasingly precarious and survival uncertain, it has been conducting probably the last but also the most painful of its pogroms. Numerous churches and facilities of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in communion with the Moscow Patriarchy have been stormed by the secret police and priests, monks, and laypeople arrested and harassed. Without even a pretence of legal procedure, parishes belonging to the legitimate Church have been handed over to the unrecognised church entity set up in 2018 for the express purpose of supplanting it, with the connivance of the corrupt and renegade Ecumenical Patriarchy of Constantinople. Quite naturally, one of the main targets of this persecution is the symbolic Kiev Pechersk Monastery overlooking the capital. It is under the jurisdiction of the canonical church.
In November, it was searched by the secret police and its abbot, archimandrite Paul, and the monastics were aggressively mistreated on the pretext of looking for evidence of political activity hostile to the regime. The junta then proceeded to draft a law that would ban church entities suspected of having ties with foreign ecclesiastical centres, a measure clearly aimed at the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is in communion with the Patriarchy of Moscow and commands the loyalty of the majority of the population.
🇺🇦 Today in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, a man entered the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God and cut the priest’s throat. Father Anthony is in intensive care now. pic.twitter.com/1BvKJDKpAE
— 🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 (@apocalypseos) January 3, 2023
Hesitant to overplay its hand and seize at once Ukraine’s holiest religious shrine, the junta has perfidiously adopted a gradualist approach, choosing instead an intermediate solution that should not alarm unduly the war- and terror-weary public. Arbitrarily and without explanation it has closed off the Monastery’s upper floors, decreeing that December 31, 2022, would be the last day that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church would be allowed to conduct religious services there.
Needless to say, none of these outrages have been noted or condemned by the human rights and rule of law watchdogs of the collective West. And how could they possibly have been, given that the perpetrators are their own Ukrainian puppets? Public admission of such foul deeds would demolish the mendacious narrative fabricated to misrepresent those thugs as champions of freedom and democracy.
There is a compelling argument that the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine is not just a local project but part of a broader scheme, executed in every instance on instructions by the same external decision-making centres. The giveaway is the ultimatum of the Baltic statelets to their local Orthodox churches, which also are in communion with the Moscow Patriarchy, to either sever ties or face repercussions. Such concerted assaults on the freedom of conscience had not been seen even at the height of the cold war. Nor had it occurred to any of the Western governments which were at war with Germany to demand of their local Roman Catholic hierarchies to either sever ties with the Vatican, which was located in the territory of Axis belligerent Italy, or be placed outside the law. But that is exactly what did occur to them now.
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