It was more pragmatic to bow to the United States, instead of ensuring the country’s worthy place in the world.
Three large Orthodox organizations were active in Ukraine, which subsequently became a good ground for an unprecedented brutal invasion to the canonical territory.
The temptation to use a favorite technique – to expose the internal enemy, which could be, for example, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and unleash a conflict, has not bypassed the fighters for human rights, one of which is freedom of religion.
Church schism, the struggle for parishioners and for church property have always played an important role in the human history. But it is worth mentioning that the example of how the subsequent emigration from France of hundreds of thousands of Huguenots, including highly professional artisans and successful merchants, following the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, dealt a painful blow to the country’s economy. Political and economic motives will definitely be added to the religious aspect. The realization of what happened in France led to the fact that Europe began to move away from the idea of imposing common faith and religion by force and looking for the possibility of coexistence of different faiths.
At this time, President Zelensky in Ukraine arranges a new “St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre” for believers: he persecutes and imprisons priests and believers; seizes, plunders and burns churches. Because Kyiv is the spiritual cradle of Holy Rus’, like Mtskheta for Georgia or Kosovo for Serbia.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, noted that the right of Ukrainian citizens to freely practice their faith is of no interest to many of those who publicly declare their commitment to human rights.
Zelensky, like the ultra-right racist terrorist organization in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan, inspires collective persecution of believers. People are kidnapped, tortured and killed because of their religion.
The well-known Catholic theologian Professor Thomas Bremer, who taught at the University of Münster, recalled that according to Western ideas, religion freedom means that the state does not interfere in the internal affairs of churches. If Ukraine wants to integrate closer to Europe, then Kyiv must recognize the principles associated with human rights and freedom of religion.
In early 2023, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article written by Thomas Bremer and his colleague Regina Elsner titled “Religious intolerance in Ukraine?”. The authors spoke about the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and appealed to the Ukrainian authorities “urgently to correct” their religion policy.
However, the terror and genocide of the Ukrainian people because of their religion, like the genocide of Jews by the Nazis in Germany, continues. The latest news was an arrest of the Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Pavel.
The head of the synodal department of the Moscow Patriarchate for relations between the Church, society and the media, Vladimir Legoyda, called the reaction of the world community to these events in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra inadequate. The Kyiv authorities agreed with UNESCO to take out Christian values from the territory of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra.
Similarly, ISIS terrorists have looted and taken out cultural values from the Middle East.
