The Russian Orthodox Church has denied supporting separatist turmoil in ... fire of assaults by pro-Russian rebels on Ukrainian security and government buildings ... The Moscow church has avoided giving explicit support for ...
Evidence Grows of Russian Orthodox Clergy’s Aiding Ukraine Rebels
Photo
Lining a road leading to a
Russian Orthodox church in Slovyansk, Ukraine, are the graves of
pro-Russian fighters who died fighting Ukrainian government troops.Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
SLOVYANSK,
Ukraine — On an overcast day in April, staff members at the municipal
museum in this eastern Ukrainian town noticed strange goings-on next
door at a cultural center run by the Ukrainian arm of the Russian
Orthodox Church.
Groups
of burly men nobody recognized entered the building, known as Villa
Maria, carrying big canvas bags and wooden boxes. “We didn’t know who
they were or what they were doing,” recalled Valery Stupko, a museum
employee.
The
next morning, he said, heavily armed masked men emerged from the same
church cultural center and made their way on foot through back alleys to
Slovyansk’s main police station. Within minutes, they had seized the
police station and helped ignite what became a brush fire of assaults by
pro-Russian rebels on Ukrainian security and government buildings
across the east of the country.
The
Russian Orthodox Church, like the Kremlin, has strenuously denied any
role in stirring up or aiding separatist turmoil in Ukraine. But as
Slovyansk and other towns seized by pro-Russian rebels have fallen over
the summer to a since-stalled Ukrainian government offensive in the
east, evidence has begun to accumulate of close ties between the church,
or at least individual Orthodox priests, and the pro-Russian cause.
Photo
Archimandrite Savva, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, fled after separatists wanted him dead.Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
“They
were working hand in hand,” said Victor Butko, the pro-Ukrainian editor
of a small newspaper here shut down by the rebels during their nearly
three-month occupation of the town. He said priests at an Orthodox
church in the center of town often blessed the rebel fighters and let
them store ammunition on church grounds.
Since
they began their drive to grab chunks of territory back in April,
pro-Russian insurgents have repeatedly shifted their political agenda,
undecided over whether they want eastern Ukraine to become part of
Russia, an independent country or an autonomous region of Ukraine in a
loose federal state.
Throughout,
however, leaders have declared themselves bearers of the banner of
“Holy Rus,” both a theological concept akin to the Kingdom of Heaven and
a reference to a state in the Middle Ages that comprised the territory
of modern Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.
Embracing
Orthodox Christianity as a force to unite these now divided Slavic
lands and also their own fractured movement, the rebels, fortified
recently by an influx of weapons and soldiers from Russia, used their period in power here purging Slovyansk of rival Christian denominations.
They
seized the Good News Church, a large evangelical complex, moving in
Russian icons and replacing Protestant services with Orthodox ones. They
parked tanks in the center’s gardens and, blessed by Russian Orthodox
priests chanting prayers, began lobbing shells at Ukrainian forces
outside town. When the rebels fled, they needed two big trucks to haul
all their weaponry.
Petr
Dudnik, the Good News Church pastor, said he did not know who exactly
was behind the takeover but said it fit into a long campaign by the
Russian Orthodox Church to portray competing denominations, particularly
evangelicals, as a heretical fifth column inspired and financed by the
United States.
The
Orthodox Church, like the Roman Catholic Church, traces its origins to
the earliest Christian church established by the Apostles and, shaped by
the different histories and cultures of its main strongholds in the
eastern Mediterranean and Slavic lands, comprises a wide range of
divergent views and political attachments. But unlike the Rome-based
Catholic Church, from which it split in the schism of 1054, the Orthodox
Church is divided into autonomous branches, with the Moscow
patriarchate a particularly conservative and, in territory it judges
bound to Russia by history, language and faith, assertive force.
“We
cannot ignore the fact that the conflict in the Ukraine has unambiguous
religious overtones” Patriarch Kirill I, the Moscow-based head of the
Russian church and its Ukrainian affiliate, wrote in a recent appeal to
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in Istanbul, the Orthodox faith’s
most senior cleric. Accusing rival churches, including a breakaway
Ukrainian Orthodox church, of persecuting believers who obey the Moscow
patriarchate, he cast efforts by the Ukrainian military to confront
Russian-backed rebels as a religious war intended to “overpower the
canonical Orthodox Church.”
Rival
church leaders say there is indeed a religious struggle underway but
insist its root cause is political and what they see as the Moscow
patriarchate’s role as an instrument of Kremlin policy. “Patriarch
Kirill has become part of the Russian government, and it is in this
light that his words and actions should be perceived,” said Patriarch
Filaret, the head of an Orthodox hierarchy based in Kiev, the Ukrainian
capital.
The
Moscow church has avoided giving explicit support for separatist gunmen
but made no effort to rein in pro-Russian fighters who, claiming to
serve the Russian Orthodox Church, imposed a reign of terror on
Slovyansk marked by murders, kidnappings and general thuggery.
Among
their principal targets were Christians defiant of the Moscow church’s
claims of religious primacy and suspected of connections with the West.
“Their
logic is simple: You are an American church and America is our enemy so
we have to kill you,” said Mr. Dudnik, the evangelical pastor. No one
at his center had been killed, he said but added that the rebels had
murdered four evangelical Christians from another Slovyansk church.
Grabbed
by pro-Russian gunmen in June after a Pentecost service at the Divine
Transfiguration Church, all four victims were taken away for
interrogation and were later found dead in a burned-out car. The Voice
of Russia, a state-run radio station, asserted against all known
evidence that they had been killed by the Ukrainian Army.
Instigators
of the rebellion, notably Igor Strelkov, a Russian former intelligence
officer, embrace a radical strand of Orthodox tradition suffused with
xenophobia, a passionate expectation of the Second Coming of Christ and a
belief in Russia’s right and duty to rule the lands of Holy Rus.
Mr.
Strelkov, who commanded rebel forces in Slovyansk, fled in July to
Donetsk, where he became “defense minister” of a self-declared
separatist state.
As
regular Russian army units became more involved in the conflict late
last month in a push to halt and then reverse Ukraine’s battlefield
gains, however, Moscow appears to have turned away from rebel leaders
whose religious zeal had given the separatist cause a fanatical and
increasingly unpopular complexion.
Mr.
Strelkov suddenly disappeared after reports that he had been shot in a
power struggle. Debunking rumors that he was dead, last week he popped
up at an Orthodox monastery on an island near St. Petersburg along with
Alexander Dugin, a Russian ultranationalist who champions the church as
the core of a Russia-dominated new world order.
Remembered
in Slovyansk as a ruthless zealot, Mr. Strelkov waged a relentless
campaign against not only evangelicals but also fellow Orthodox
believers who refused to recognize the authority of a Moscow-based
patriarch and instead follow the rival Orthodox hierarchy in Kiev.
A
single church commanded from Moscow during the Soviet period, the
Orthodox church split after the 1991 collapse of Communism with the
establishment of the Kiev patriarchate, whose current leader, Patriarch
Filaret, has supported the Ukrainian government and denounced what he
described as “numerous death threats” against his clergy and followers
by pro-Russian rebels.
A
month after Slovyansk fell to the rebels, a group of Russian Cossacks
arrived at a Ukrainian Orthodox church on Karl Marx Street and announced
that they were seizing the property in the name of the Cossack Orthodox
Army, said the Ukrainian Church’s local head, Archimandrite Savva.
“They
said I was a charlatan and had no right to preach because only the
Russian Orthodox Church can promote Holy Rus,” recalled the priest, who
fled Slovyansk after being warned that pro-Russian gunmen wanted him
dead. He returned after the rebels pulled out.
The
town’s Russian Orthodox priests have now themselves mostly disappeared,
apparently taking flight to escape possible arrest by the Ukrainian
authorities for their role in supporting the rebellion. Among those who
have gone missing is Father Vitaly, a priest at Slovyansk’s oldest
church, Church of the Holy Resurrection, which controlled the cultural
center used by the gunmen. His staff said he was away on a trip and
would return, though when was unclear. A telephone number they gave for
him did not work.
When
pro-Russian gunmen first took control of Slovyansk, the town’s elected
mayor, Neli Shtepa, who initially supported the takeover, said in an
interview with Ukraine’s Unian news agency that Father Vitaly had
welcomed the rebels onto church property to help them prepare their
initial assault. She was arrested by the rebels soon afterward and spent
three months detained in city hall.
Archbishop
Arseny of Svyatogorsk Lavra, the Moscow patriarchate’s senior area
cleric, issued a statement dismissing Ms. Shtepa’s accusations against
the church as “fantasy” and slander.
Villa
Maria, the Orthodox church cultural center, has now been emptied of the
pro-Russian fighters who used it as a recreation center during their
occupation of Slovyansk. They left behind empty boxes of ammunition,
empty bottles of liquor, weight lifting equipment and a jumble of
leaflets denouncing the government in Kiev and its Western backers.
“Today we face a choice,” read one. “Unity with our brother peoples or
falling under the European boot.”
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