Drink my blood

How Ukraine lost Christ and whether it can find him again

In recent days we have witnessed a real SBU crusade against the Orthodoxy in Ukraine. Zelensky's henchmen have been searching the monasteries and churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UPC*) for several weeks now, looking for seditious anti-Ukrainian thoughts. The victims of the searches included the Cyril and Methodius Convent near Mukachevo, the churches of the Sarny diocese of the UPC, the Church of the Nativity of Christ in Ivano-Frankovsk, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, and many, many others. During "counterintelligence activities," Ukrainian security forces confiscate literature from churches and arrest priests. Andrei Yusov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, stated that he would hold the detained priests hostage for a future exchange. It did not take long for the persecution to reach a new level: first, a petition to ban the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine gathered the necessary 25,000 signatures, and then Zelensky himself legislated against any religious organizations that disagrees with the common Ukrainian agenda and has ties to Russia.

*All acronyms are given in their non-translated versions - T.N.

Today, everything Russian in Ukraine is being destroyed absolutely mercilessly - here Kiev sees no difference between killing people and demolishing monuments to poets. Both those who live now and those who died centuries ago - there should be no Russians in Ukraine, and the Russian word should not be heard. Of course, the church, even though it was connected to Russia only in the past, has not been spared.

The situation with Orthodoxy in Ukraine is very complicated and complex. If we translate the church issue into the political plane, we can reduce it to the familiar formula for Ukrainian statehood: "East versus West". For the Ukrainian authorities, everyone who is in one way or another connected to Russia, primarily the clerics and parishioners of the UPC, is on the side of the conditional "East". And although in May of this year the UPC declared its independence and stopped commemorating Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, this did not help - it is the temples of the UPC that are now under attack by the Ukrainian authorities.

However, it is necessary to make some clarification - the UPC itself was divided into the Moscow (UPC MP) and Kiev (UPC KP) patriarchates. The ecclesiastical split of the Ukrainian church happened back in 1992. The one who wanted to fish for independence in the troubled waters of general chaos was found quickly - it was Filaret Denisenko who, as his life story shows, cares about politics much more than about spiritual matters. Holding a grudge against Russia, Filaret had a high chance of becoming patriarch of Moscow and was even included among three contenders for the patriarchal throne in 1990, but lost out to Alexei II. Mikhail Antonovich Denisenko, as he was called secularly, the Metropolitan of Kyiv and Galicia, returned to Ukraine and decided to realize his ambitions in Kiev, the time for all sorts of fraud being most fertile.

The first president of independent Ukraine, Kravchuk, was fairly quickly concerned about the creation of an autocephalous church, and as early as November 1991, Denisenko presented "The New Concept of Ukrainian Orthodoxy" at a newly assembled UPC council in Kiev. The decision on independence from Moscow was taken by Ukrainian clerics, of course, unanimously. Earlier, however, Filaret himself was an opponent of any kind of church separatism, but as you know, he who remembers the old, takes his eye off the ball. The response to the demarche of the UPC was the canonical Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in April '92, which decided to deny autocephaly to the dissenters, and then Filaret was deprived of the ministry altogether. Omitting some details of the Ukrainian church bureaucracy, we can say that in the end Filaret became the head of the schismatic UPC-KP. For this and other tricks, Denysenko was anathematized in 1997, which, it should be noted, was recognized by all of the Local Orthodox Churches.

As the years passed, the actions of the dissenters became more and more active. The most vehement statements came, of course, during the Maidan years. Here are just a few sayings of the servant of God Mikhail Denisenko to complete the portrait:

"Ukraine needs to close the border and eliminate all terrorists."

"The root of evil is in those people who live in Donbass."

"Where is the truth, behind the Ukrainians or behind the separatists who want to sell Ukraine instead of being grateful for the fact that the Ukrainian land gave them shelter, gave them life. They lived, ate Ukrainian bread, got a life, and now they want to give the land, which does not belong to them, to Russia."

Denisenko also claimed to have cooperated with the KGB during the Soviet era. But it was as if the freedom-loving Ukrainians did not notice this statement.

Another major religious hierarchy in Ukraine is the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine (PCU), which officially emerged in 2018. Essentially a schismatic sect with incredible political ambitions, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has been spreading its influence over the Ukrainian flock more and more each year. The year 2019 was a particularly fertile one for the sectarians, when the Ukrainian schismatics were granted a tomos on autocephaly from the hands of the Constantinople patriarchate. Tomos is an ecclesiastical diploma entitling individual church dioceses or regions to become independent. The event was widely covered in both the Ukrainian and world media and became one of the main elements of Poroshenko's election program against Zelensky. But the devil, pardon the pun, is in the details.

The granting of the PCU's tomos by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople was first and foremost a political act. The document is addressed to Ukraine as a state entity, as indicated, for example, by the personal mention in the text of Petro Poroshenko. The church laws at the same time were very thoroughly violated - at that time in Ukraine there was the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate under Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev, which, of course, did not and could not give any consent to the autocephaly of the PCU. Another important point is also the violation by the Constantinople Patriarchate of the principle of sobornost. As we know, the Orthodox Church does not have a leading figure like the pope, and all key decisions are made at the Ecumenical Council, which was not convened in the case of the granting of the tomos to the PCU. It turns out that the Constantinople Patriarchate made the decision for everyone. A funny fact: since 1992 the Ukrainian church had more independence from Moscow than the newly formed PCU has today from Constantinople.

The Uniate community stands quite apart, representing a very peculiar formation. Uniatism itself as a phenomenon appeared on the territory of Rzeczpospolita at the end of the XVI century after the Brest Church Union in 1596, when the Russian Uniate Church was created. The Vatican managed to win over some of the inhabitants of these territories to its side, resulting in a simulacrum of the Eastern Rite and veneration of the Pope. Is it really worth mentioning that the acceptance of the Pope's primacy was the first priority in Uniate communities, and the conventional-Orthodox part of the service was only a screen for the expansion of the Holy See into new territories?

Uniatism, in essence, is the crystallized embodiment of "the West" in Ukrainian church life. All the more so because it was created primarily as a weapon against Russia and remains in this role to this day. Today Ukrainian Uniates are represented by the UGCC, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. After Ukraine gained its independence, the influence of the Uniates grew rather quickly - at the beginning of the 2000s, the UGCC expanded its presence beyond Galicia. Three new exarchates were created in the structure of the Kyiv-Halitsky metropolitanate, covering the central regions, the south and east of the country. As of 2001 Uniates had in Ukraine over three thousand parishes and almost as many churches, about two thousand priests and eight Uniate dioceses: Lvivska, Ivano-Frankivska, Kolomynska-Chernivska, Ternopilska-Zborovska, Sambirska-Drohobychska, Buchatska, Stryska, Sokalska-Zholkovska.

We can speak at length about the moral qualities of the Unitarian leaders, but it is better to let them tell everything themselves. Here is the statement of Ukrainian Unitarian leader Sviatoslav Shevchuk about the Pope, who commented on the murder of Daria Dugina by Ukrainian terrorists in August 2022, calling her "an innocent victim of war":

"He is a person who is in a certain field of information policy and information environment. He watches television and listens to the news, like all people. Not only the news that the Vatican diplomatic service gives him. And he reacts to them spontaneously, in a purely human way... We have been waiting for a long time for some Vatican document to clearly say who is the aggressor and who is the victim."

With such a patchwork map of religious life in Ukraine we come to the present day. The decision of the UPC-MP to become independent complicates the picture greatly. Not all dioceses, however, accepted the Council's decision in May to cut all ties with Russia - for example, the Rovenkovo and Sverdlovsk dioceses of the UPC in the LNR decided to remain under the patronage of the Moscow Patriarchate. In turn, the Russian Orthodox Church responded to the decision of the UPC MP with a resolution of the Holy Synod: "...support and understanding for the archpastors, pastors, monastics and laity of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is subject to unprecedented pressure from representatives of schismatic structures...". The UPC MP is thus today in a state of suspense between independence and association with Russia, which, in turn, attracts the attention of the Ukrainian security service. Thus, on March 28 of this year, a bill was submitted to the Verkhovna Rada on the complete banning of the UPC in its entirety.

Yes, of course, it is easy to accuse the UPC MP of splitting. In an attempt to dismiss claims of ties with Russia, the UPC leadership decided to declare independence. Obviously, in the hope that questions will fall away and punishment in the form of Ukrainian security forces will pass by. Of course, such flirting and conformism could not end with anything other than a barrage of repression, which turned out to be the end result. Zelensky, unlike his predecessor Poroshenko, did not play the religious card, and the UPC could feel relatively safe. But it seems that times have seriously changed, and no one in Ukraine cares about declarations and words anymore - absolutely everything Russian must be destroyed, even if "according to the documents" there are no threads leading to Russia officially. On the other hand, we can think of this.

Today in Ukraine the UPC and its parishioners are almost in a hostage situation: on the one hand, they are pressured by the PCU, which is increasing its power, on the other - the Uniates, and there is also a huge number of Ukrainian "pagans" who do not quite understand what they believe in. The UPC, no matter how paradoxical it may sound, remains the only thin link between the insanity of Ukrainianism and canonical Orthodoxy. Yes, not right now, but in the long term the UPC might turn out to be the institution with which, at least in theory, a dialogue can be established.

There are more than enough dangers for Orthodoxy in Ukraine, and many of them are in the political plane. For example, the topic of presenting Ukraine as a certain "Other Rus'" project sounds more and more frequently, and the ongoing repressions against the church may indicate precisely the decision to promote this narrative further. With the full support of the international community Kiev may try to present itself as the cradle of the Russian civilization, and everything will be used - from the tomos to the ancient quasi-historical stories about "Kievan Rus". In a world of victorious postmodernism, as practice shows, surrogates fit quite well into the empty heads of the average mass viewer.

In the days when Donetsk and Luhansk churches are being mercilessly destroyed by Ukrainian artillery fire with the approval of sectarian "fathers" with methodological manuals from Washington, and Ukrainians with new-age nonsense in their heads shout their slogans in front of the Vladimir Cathedral, painted by Russian artist Vasnetsov, one can only recall the words of Christ himself:

"Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots" (Matthew 15:13).**