The convulsions of the Russian Orthodox Church will not help peace - Grabovskyi

As reported duhovnyfront.com.ua, adviser to the Secretary of the National Security Council for the reintegration of Donbas Serhiy Sivoho said that the church can help in settling the events in the east of Ukraine.

It sounds nice, almost in a European way, notes Serhii Grabovskyi, a contributor to the Den newspaper, Radio Svoboda reports.

However, he is interested in what kind of church is present on both sides of the front line, whether it speaks with its own voice or relays someone else's, who it has always been an assistant to, and what its peacemaking was all about.

The author notes that the only church that operates on both sides of the front line is the so-called UOC, which is nothing more than a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, created at one time by Stalin to consolidate his dictatorship. In recent times, the Russian Orthodox Church, in the form of the UPC, acted as a faithful assistant to the Russian occupiers.

Thus, Crimean activists remind that the church of the Moscow Patriarchate became a refuge for the first Russian soldiers who arrived in 2014 to seize Crimea. And soon in Donbas, the priests of the "UPC" began consecrating flags and blessing local militants. In general, dozens of witnesses have described the role of the priests and monks of the UPC in Donbas as pawns of the Russian occupiers.

Therefore, the contributor emphasizes that neither the OCU, nor the UGCC, nor the Protestant churches operate freely on both sides of the front line, only the "UPC" of the Moscow Patriarchate operates freely. The author puts the abbreviation "UPC" in quotation marks, since after the departure of Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan) to Eternity and the transfer of several hundred parishes to the OCU, the church can only nominally be called "Ukrainian". And the "peacemaking" of the branch of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine can only be manifested in the creation of new foci of the "Russian world" and the affirmation of "Novorossiya". And contributing to the forcible secession of new territories from Ukraine, the publicist notes.