An Interview with Countess Benckendorff

Father, we last spoke like this two years ago in May 2024. Since then a lot has happened in our world and not much good. Personally, I have survived thanks to the Romanian Church, to my garden, the roses, which are now at the end of May already in bud, and to one or two clothes shops which have not yet closed and which I love. You know how important that is to me, you even came with us once to Cambridge, where I bought that lovely dark red coat from John Lewis, you remember. I don’t buy much, it is too expensive, but I do like good quality. That is my weakness.  Anyway, enough of these women’s matters, let us pass to serious things.

The Russian Church Hierarchy

Countess Benckendorff: I want to know what you are thinking about our Russian Church. Patriarch Kyrill is 80 years old. The question everyone is asking is who will be the next Russian Patriarch?

Father Andrew: Countess, how should I know?!

On paper, there is a choice of candidates between a liberal and a conservative. The liberal is the ecumenist, the very young and totally unprincipled careerist Metr Antony (Sevriuk). I know about him, since over 20 years ago a friend of mine studied with him in Saint Petersburg. He was much disliked by the other seminarists as a ‘grass’, стукач. He has been the new favourite ever since the first scandal with Metr Hilarion (Alfeyev), who is nearly 60. (The latter has just been feted in nationalist Moscow and presented as the innocent victim of Western machinations, but has still been sent into new exile in Brazil. His career is over). On the other hand, the nationalist conservative wing wants Metr Tikhon (Shevkunov), 68 this year, who is currently in the Crimea, building his fantastic nationalist history Church theme park, New Chersonese.

Now, liberals and conservatives have always existed in the Church and always will do. In the fourth century St Epiphanius of Salamis in Cyprus was considered a conservative and he accused St John Chrysostom of being a liberal. But both are saints. The problem is not in liberal or conservative tendencies, it is in excesses, because excesses lead to schisms, the refusal to concelebrate. In the time of Christ on earth, the pharisees were conservatives, but extreme ones, and the saducees were liberals, but extreme ones. This is true of the Russian Church today, where there are also such extremes.

The excessive nationalist, isolationist and racist conservatives, who condemn and despise every Orthodox in every other Local Church, who is not Russian, as racially inferior, sound like FSB Stalinists or Old Ritualists. They are wrong. Their centre is the new heavy and gloomy Military Cathedral outside Moscow, which is like a Museum of Stalinism.

A Cathedral in memory of the 27 million Soviet citizens, 18 million civilians and 9 million military, murdered by the Nazis, should have been dedicated to the Resurrection, full of light, shining like a beacon of hope, painted a brilliant white outside. It should not have been a tomb of gloom, where you shudder

And as for the hideous heathen mausoleum in Moscow with Lenin’s rotted mummy inside, it should be bulldozed tonight and replaced with a beautiful white church dedicated to the New Martyrs and Confessors as soon as possible. Then we could at last say that Russia has thrown off Stalinism – which it clearly has not. Here the Ukrainians, who change Stalinist place names in the Ukraine, are right. The trouble is that then they impose new place names in honour of Nazis….

On the other hand, the excessive liberals (Uminsky, Kuraev etc), who have joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople, sound like Protestant ecumenists or else right-wing CIA agents who hate Russia, like the two ROCOR bishops. These extreme liberals are wrong, they are just secularists, pro-Americans, who want to see Russia destroyed. This is crass American nationalism! For instance, the American Synod has supported CIA policies in the Ukraine, called for Russian troops to abandon the persecuted Russians in the Eastern Ukraine, and as a result has lost many Russian faithful.

Significantly, however, the old Russians being purged from ROCOR are largely being replaced by rebaptised, ultra-conservative Protestant converts, bearded fake Russians, ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’, until they lapse, as they always do. Their lapse is usually into the spiritual irrelevance of old calendarist sects, which are basically just Protestant, as they are protest groups. The new ROCOR is full of hatred, like all spiritually irrelevant sects, because hatred for others is how they justify the fact that they are precisely a sect. Hatred is the sign of dark sectarianism. Love is the sign of the Church. ‘I am the Light of the world’, said Christ, He never said that He is the darkness of the sect.

Before the Revolution, the liberal Metr Antony Vadkovsky of Saint Petersburg protected the revolutionary Fr George Gapon, who was something of a debauchee as well as a pro-Marxist political activist, before being murdered. On the other hand, at that time there was the conservative Metr Antony of Kiev (Khrapovitsky), with his young, educated monks, so many of whom then had to be defrocked. However, neither of these was made Patriarch, indeed the first had already died by 1917. Instead, the 1918 Council elected, by lot, the saintly missionary from America, Tikhon, as Patriarch. That was the right choice, the third way, the mystical way, the way of prophecy, the way of the Holy Spirit. Why do we have to put up with another liberal or another conservative? They do not inspire. They are only politicians.

St Tikhon refused to bless whites or reds, saying that all Orthodox are his flock. This is what should have happened in 2022, following the example of St Nicholas of Tokyo, who, when Japan treacherously attacked Russia causing war in 1904, simply disappeared from public life and prayed for peace. A just peace is the only victory for all. Similarly, in 2008 Patriarch Alexis II called for and won peace in Georgia, after the Georgians had invaded South Abkhazia, murdering 1500 plus locals and Russian peacekeepers, and the Russians responded. (True, the Patriarch died rather mysteriously only a few months later). This peacemaking is what should have happened in the Ukraine in 2022. Sadly…..

This is our only hope now. That an as yet unknown candidate will appear, sent by the Holy Spirit to save the Russian Church from the schismatic isolation that its present leaders have created for it. This is what Elder Nikolai Guryanov hinted at. Surely such a Patriarch will refrock all those defrocked anti-canonically for purely political reasons, just as the Patriarchate and the American Synod refrocked each other in 2007, and instead defrock the dozens of utterly corrupt and criminal ‘administrator-bishops’ who lord it freely in the Russian Church today, demanding money at every turn (you remember, how our solicitor told us that it was illegal), bullying, threatening and intimidating in a terror regime, and so destroying parishes and parish life.

Will God send an Archpastor as Patriarch and not a Politician? At present the Russian Church, including ROCOR, runs on terror, intimidation and bullying from bishops. What about a Church which runs on Love from bishops? We can only hope. If not, for its sins, the Russian Church may be closed down in Western Europe, as the EU is threatening to do to Russian churches in Armenia. How long before the EU and UK close down the Russian Church on their territory by force? Everyone will have to flee for protection to the Romanian Patriarchate then, as it has already offered.

CB: With so many scandals, political, sexual and financial, especially among the Orthodox episcopate, which so upset me, where do we go?

FA: With the many, many scandals in Russia and in the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the scandalous suspension for political reasons of the righteous Metr Tykhikos in Cyprus, and the homosexual scandal in Moldova, there is much to be appalled at. But I found the solution fifty years ago.

In 1976 I decided that there was only way to save my soul: To follow the saints, and not money and power. The Church on earth will be saved by the Holy Spirit, not by ‘princes of the Church’, the dollar-loving politicians. This is how we overcome the depredations of patriarchs and other bishops, through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the saints. That is what I expressed in my May 2006 talk at the Fourth ROCOR Council in San Francisco, warmly greeted as inspirational then, but now completely ignored by the new ROCOR, but their organisation is dying out. I warned them. Told them so.

We joined the old ROCOR, despite the CIA sectarian corruption already among a few in it, because of the many New Martyrs and Confessors, whom the old ROCOR had bravely canonised. We follow the saints. That was why we believed that ROCOR should have merged with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2000, straight after the August Jubilee Council in Moscow, when they too canonised a great many New Martyrs and Confessors; instead, we showed patience and had to wait until 2007. And by 2017 we realised that the merger had tragically been rejected by the new ROCOR episcopate, that there would be no organic merger and metropolitanisation, that is, localisation and incarnation, as CIA-manipulated sectarianism reared its ugly head in the new, schismatic New York sect of ROCOR after 2017.

Later, after we had all received canonical releases from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2022, we joined the Romanian Church, which then canonised 32 Saints, mainly New Martyrs and Confessors, some of whom we will be venerating in the future frescoes in our main church. We follow the saints.  This year, after frescoing the little church with the Saints of these Isles, we will be celebrating the Ancient Saints of Western Europe at the International Congress in Rome of the nearly 1,100 parishes of our Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe. We follow the saints. Our church in Colchester had been dedicated to St Alban. In November 1962 St John left England, entrusting us to St Alban. This is why we had painted in the Ukraine the large icon of St Alban and St John holding our church. We follow the saints.

CB: Do you miss the Russian Church, which I and my husband once so loved and worked for in those idealistic days of the 90s?

FA: Yes, I regret the disappearance of the best of the old emigre Russian Orthodox Church, in which I had been brought up since 1972. By 2022 it had gone. In just fifty years. Where it had not died out, it had largely been replaced by that Soviet-style superstitious ritualism, you know what I mean, or by some weird and fanatical unstable Protestant converts, who know almost nothing and understood even less.

Only a few old Russian emigres born in the 30s and 40s, from the second generation, are left. We have an example here, born in 1940, whom we see regularly, Olga, whose roses you look after. She had an awful experience in the ROCOR Church in London, to which she had belonged until 2010 and had given generously. There she was treated appallingly by a former KGB agent at that church. She will never return to ROCOR, though she is of a Russian aristocratic family, like yourself.

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Archbishop George Tarasov, Archbishop Seraphim of Brussels, were real bishops. Fr Alexander Trubnikov, Fr Sophrony Sakharov, Fr Alexei Kniazev, Fr Vsevolod Dunayev, Fr Igor Vernik, Fr Ioan Pekarski were real priests. These were my fathers in the Faith and they came from all the jurisdictions. But they are all gone now.

They are gone from all three parts of the Russian Church in the Diaspora; from the part whose leadership sided with the corrupt Soviet State; from the part whose leadership sided with the corrupt Pre-Revolutionary State; from the part whose leadership wanted to corrupt Russia in the Western way, like themselves. But the real clergy were those who sided with the people, not with the leadership. Those real clergy were above petty and unloving jurisdictions, who went to whatever church was nearest to their home, disregarding the lack of love, the labels and the ideologies at the top.

CB: Why are ordinary Russian Orthodox in Russia especially so negative towards their hierarchy? Is it all about money?

FA: Yes, firstly, there is money. The senior bishops preach an ascetic life, while living in luxury, when many of the people are not at all well-off. Many of the senior bishops are mini-oligarchs who rule their dioceses under harsh, totalitarian regimes, as ROCOR now does also. One metropolitan in Russia I met in 2012 has recently even bankrupted his important metropolia. Many of the priests are very poor because the bishops steal their money with threats, like mafia gangsters. As a result, you have a huge number of scandals, like that in the Skopin Diocese in Russia, or in Kolomna (among several others) and that here in England.

The technique of the oligarch-bishop is to give good parishes to his greedy, careerist yesmen, sacking and making homeless the good priests and their families. Then the parishes collapse and their assets can be sold off. This is exactly the technique closely studied and imitated by the new ROCOR episcopate. This is a feudal system. The churches of such bishops are emptying. They are not Christians.

Secondly, there is the support for the war, with bishops and priests blessing guns, shells, tanks, missiles, machine guns etc. Are they even Christians? The present wave of Stalinist nationalism in Moscow, with its literal purges of priests who pray for peace, ‘enemies of the people’, is symptomatic of this anti-Christian, militaristic, Stalinist spirit.

Traditional values?  It is all just hypocrisy. And the same is true of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. There is nothing to choose here between Moscow and Constantinople, with its absurd and criminal OCU. Russia has still not repented for 1917. Elder Nikolai Guryanov said it. The Tsar’s servants are still not canonised, except for Evgeny Botkin. And there is still huge disrespect and even hatred for the Tsar and the Tsarina themselves. All that is happening in Russia and the Ukraine is a hangover, self-punishment for the unrepented sin of 1917.

Clearly, the Orthodoxy of such people is all for show, just clerical ritual, there is nothing inside. That is why some services now are just peopled by clerics in uniform and the people have fled. What proportion of these people are actually atheists? In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 50 priests were defrocked in Russia. (Why were they ordained in the first place? How much did they pay for ordination?) Other priests go ‘zashtat’, that is, they go off roll, effectively retiring to escape episcopal oppression.

For me, however, the main problem is theological.

The Catholicity of the Church

CB: What do you mean by that?

FA: The main problem is the destruction of the Catholicity, Соборность, of the Russian Church through schism. How have the Patriarchate of Moscow and ROCOR become international laughing stocks, losing all respect? The one is a nationalist ghetto church in self-isolation and the other a schismatic church of pharisees and fanatics. Such schism is precisely the result of the lack of Catholicity, the sense of unity of the sixteen Local Churches. Let me give you an example of this from the emigration.

I remember being told how in 1964, after the death of the very ill and demented Metr Anastasy, the American ROCOR Synod had to elect a new metropolitan. Archbp Vitaly and Archbp John of Shanghai tied for the post. Archbp John put forward Bp Philaret, the youngest bishop, as the future metropolitan, the unity candidate, thus keeping Church unity which had been threatened, and also leading to the canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Archbp Vitaly, ever ambitious, went home with his white metropolitan’s hat in his suitcase (he had brought it with him, as he had been sure that he would be elected). When Archbp Vitaly was finally elected metropolitan 22 years later, in 1986, he told everyone at his first Synod that ‘Соборность, Catholicity, is over, now I am in charge’. Archbp Antony of Geneva, who had obtained just as many votes in 1986, but had refused to become metropolitan, told us the story when he got back from New York, with that ironic smile he had. Apparently, the CIA Bp Gregory Grabbe had even threatened to get the information about ‘the Brazilian’ out of the Synod safe against Archbp Vitaly – but that is another story for another time.

Well, here in Archbp Vitaly is an example of ‘Orthodox’ Papism, the alien and anti-Catholicity doctrine which is now followed by certain Patriarchs….though not by the saintly Patriarch Ilie of Georgia and the saintly Patriarch Pavle of Serbia.

CB: What do you think is the future of the divided Churches in the Ukraine and in Africa?

FA: I don’t know.

But I will say that through their infighting in Africa, the Russian Church (which has largely established its jurisdiction by recruiting 300 poor priests in Africa, simply by paying them $600 instead of the Greek $200 a month) and the nationalist Greek Church, which tries to make Africans into Greeks, have both lost the mass of Africans. They are both compromised. The Russian Church lost all sympathy for uncanonical Greek imperialism in the Ukraine by barging into Greek Alexandria’s canonical territory in the same uncanonical way. The only African country where the Greek Church has complete loyalty is Kenya, where Metropolitan Makarios (Tillyrides), my old friend from fifty years ago, is so respected.

And they have both lost Western Europe, for the same reason. And they have both lost what will remain of the Ukraine, where they have both made themselves hated. And Moscow is now losing Moldova for the same reason, treating Moldovans as second-class citizens, as Metropolitan Vladimir admitted to me at the Metropolia in Kishinev last October.

All is lost for the same reason, because they squabbled about someone else’s territory, like unashamed colonial imperialists. There is only one solution: when the bosses are incompetent and greedy, autocephaly must come. It is called decolonisation.

The Demographic Crisis

CB: Some predict that some countries in the world will die out because of rapidly declining birthrates, for example, in Italy and Germany and even more in Japan and South Korea. Do you think this is true?

FA: I was brought up on the UN myth of overpopulation – soon there would be so many people that the Earth would collapse. It was of course all nonsense. In the last half of the twentieth century that myth of overpopulation was commonly proclaimed. In fact, there is plenty for everyone, if only there is fair distribution of resources, and wars and injustices stop.

Now we often see the refusal to have children, which is causing the gradual decline in the birthrate in certain countries. This is the result of economic slavery, impossible lives, whereby both husbands and wives have to work very hard just in order to survive. The only thing that counts in secular culture is GDP, so all must work. And it is almost impossible to have a family with two hard-working wage-earners – in fact wage-slaves.

This is the result of the lack of respect for mothers and motherhood. And that comes in many Western societies in part from the Protestant rejection of veneration of the Mother of God. Consequently, there has been the conditioning, indoctrination and brainwashing of girls to make them think that they are boys. As a result, they cannot cope with having children and also gender confusion has ensued. Put simply, the world will die out only if family life is made impossible. And that is what they are trying to do, though they have not succeeded in this.

As you know, it is also the Orthodox world where birthrates are declining very rapidly, partly because of the dreadful situation and the millions of deaths in the Ukraine, but birthrates in Russia, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece are also only about 1.5 children per woman and going down. The time will come when the Orthodox population of the world will decline from 200 million to 150 million. It is suicide.

CB: Thank you, Father. Your words about the lack of respect for mothers and motherhood are close to my heart.

High Suffolk, May-June 2026

Published: All Saints Sunday, 7 June 2026

An Interview with Count Benckendorff

 Two years ago you interviewed me and my wife and published those interviews under the title The Benckendorff Papers, illustrating the brochure with photos from our home, with our permission. Our project now is to set up a small Russian Orthodox chapel in the garden with your help, though we also want to include some local saints there.

Now we wanted to interview you, Father. The last two years have3 seen so many events. I would like to ask you about political matters, the Countess would like to ask about the Church and other matters, but you will have to come back for that..

Personal

Count Benckendorff: My first question is general – where do you get your ideas and insights from?

Fr Andrew: It is perhaps embarrassing to admit it, but the truth is that any good ideas, if there are any, come when I am not thinking, but when I am asleep. They are sent to me. They are not my thoughts. I regularly have to get up in the night and write thoughts down, which is why I have always kept paper and pen next to my bed. This is the proof that it is bad to think, or in Griboyedov’s Russian expression, ‘grief comes from thinking’ – горе от ума!

CB: How many people did our parishe4s lose when we transferred from ROCOR to the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate in August 2021?

FA: We lost six Russians who were nationalists and used to come to church about once a month, in part to speak Russian to one another. And we also lost a couple with four children, who were new converts with more zeal than knowledge, who then led their children into the ROCOR schism.

Almost exactly six months later, in February 2022, the Moscow Patriarchate, where we had been, was forced by political pressure to give us a canonical release for the Romanian Patriarchate. This was eight days before the SMO began in the Ukraine. As you know, here we continue exactly as before as refugees, on the old calendar, in the Russian way, but with about 200 new parishioners, mainly Moldovans and Ukrainians, and, above all, free of politics, from Moscow, the CIA and Constantinople. And our Moldovan bishop, whose surname is Rusnak, speaks much better Russian than the old ROCOR bishop!

The Follies of Empire

CB: Let us get on to politics. Has Trump accelerated the decline of the West?

FA: The West has been attempting suicide ever since 1914. The process accelerated greatly after 1939 with the second European attempt at tribal suicide. In 2014, 100 years after the first attempt, the third attempt started. Trump is merely a stage in this third attempt, Trump or no Trump.

Arguably, under Biden the decline accelerated even more quickly than it has under Trump. After all, Trump’s slogan is MAGA. Now, if you have to make American great again, that means that it is already no longer great. If the slogan was KAG, Keep America Great, that would be different. But that is not the slogan. Western Europe’s decline began in 1914, that of the USA, arguably, began in 1975, with its defeat in Vietnam and is ending in Iran, where Trump foolishly thought he could weaken China, destroy BRICS, take revenge for Iran’s liberation from the US puppet regime in Iran in 1979, please the powerful Israel lobby in Washington and, perhaps, keep the rest of the Epstein Files out of public view.

The failure of America to destroy Russia through the battering ram of the Ukraine, which Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden began, is America’s Retreat from Moscow. Its failure to destroy Iran, which began in 1979, is America’s Waterloo. Such are the Follies of Empire.

CB: We of course know Russia and the Ukraine very well. Who do you support in the war?

FA: Do I support a group of Nazi atheist nationalists, who venerate Hitler and his 50,000 Ukrainian SS collaborators, who murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews and Russians, or do I support a group of Communist atheist nationalists, who venerate the mummy of Lenin and his Russian Bolshevik collaborators, who murdered 700,000 Soviet citizens? The answer is neither. There is no Holy Rus here on either side. I do not and cannot venerate Death, which is the flag and ideology of both Lenin and Hitler, of both Communists and Nazis.

In 2014 the US neocons installed their Nazi Galician junta in Kiev, who then sold off huge chunks of the Ukraine to US Agribusiness like Cargill and Blackrock for billions and enforced Ukrainian as the State language. Yet 83% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language; a situation similar to that here in Wales, where most people speak English as their first language and most do not even speak Welsh. Let us not talk about Holy Rus here.

As for Russia, Holy Rus died there in the appalling Russian betrayal of its own Tsar in 1917. Only a few crumbs survived inside Russia and in the emigration outside Russia, so let us not talk about Holy Rus here either.

As you know from your own life in Kiev, modern Ukrainians are just as little Orthodox as modern Russians, both with their mass abortions, declining birthrates, divorces (‘Orthodox’ Kiev is a world centre for surrogacy and prostitution) and all the rest. The only difference is that one regime is pro-Communist, the other is pro-Nazi. It is a Soviet-Nazi war, the end of the unfinished Second World War.

This is a war that common sense says is unnecessary. As you know, I have been to both countries frequently. Put simply, I would tell the Ukrainian proxies and their Western puppeteers: Don’t poke the bear, even if you do not like Russia and find it oppressive, it is still a bear, far bigger than you. It is very foolish for a small and poor country, ruled by Zionist oligarchs, like the Ukraine, to take on the fourth largest economy in the world, which has the world’s best-armed and best-trained army and an endless amount of arms, both traditional and very sophisticated. Use diplomacy. Negotiate unless you want to be killed.

The fault here is with the Western sponsors of Kiev, who have constantly refused to talk and have ‘cancelled’ Russia as ‘subhuman’, just as the Nazis called all Slavs ‘Untermenschen’. The West openly says that its task is ‘to Yugoslav’, that is, to destroy, Russia through divide and rule, just as Hitler’s task was. Therefore, Russia has in turn cancelled the aggressive and hateful Western elite, turned its back on Europe and become Eurasian, facing China, Iran, North Korea.

Today 70% of the cars in Moscow are Chinese. That says a lot; the West has lost Russia and its markets for ever. Emperor Peter’s ‘window on Europe’ was closed by the West after 300 years and Russia was fed up with the draught anyway. Wars happen because people want them to happen and the West wanted this one to happen. Too many people in the West are still making too much money out of this war to want to stop it.

CB: To your knowledge, is the Russian economy suffering from the war in the Ukraine? What annoys everyone we know is the shutting down of Whatsapp and other social media channels by President Putin, rather than anything else.

FA: My friend the economist Sergei Glaziev is optimistic, though I think he should have been appointed head of the National Bank, and not Nabullina. And I can’t see any real suffering to the economy because of the war. The whole world wants to buy Russian national resources, wheat and technology. Apparently, Russian national debt is still only about 16% of GDP (and it is going down thanks to the US, which has doubled the price of oil and gas by attacking Iran, and Russia is selling oil and gas in huge quantities to Western Europe through India, as well as to Asia).

The European elite is financing the Kiev regime by getting even further into debt, which in most Western countries is well over 100% of GDP. The Ukraine went bankrupt in 2022. Russian military spending is 7% of GDP, the Ukraine’s is something over 40% and its teachers and pensioners are paid only by Western money, not to mention its millions of emigrants to Western Europe, many of whom are fed by Western social security systems. Look at the facts.

CB: Why do you think the Russian victory in the Ukraine has been so slow?  We both thought it would end in early 2025.

FA: I would not use the word ‘victory’ here. In wars everyone is a loser. Parts of ‘liberated’ eastern Ukraine are in ruins. The Russian Army has only ‘liberated’ the ruins created by both sides. Where is the victory here? Real victory can only come with a just and therefore long-lasting peace, which accommodates both sides. This is unlike the injustices that happened at Versailles in 1919, which made a second round of war inevitable. And the injustices of 1945 made today’s third round of war also inevitable.

The real solution in the Ukraine, and everywhere else in the former USSR, has never been in war, but has always been in self-determination. Let the people choose which country, and also which Local Church, they want to belong to, and then redraw the borders. However, that goes against imperialism, that of the US, and of Kiev and Moscow (and that of the Russian Church), all of which want to impose by force. The Follies of Imperialism always go against the interests of the peoples.

If only Russia had taken Kiev in the first weeks of the conflict in early 2022 and changed the Nazi regime there for a democratic regime, then perhaps self-determination could have been implemented. So-called ‘Ukrainians’ could have been allowed by internationally-observed referendum in each province (as had happened in the Crimea in 2014) to return to Russia (as before 1922), or to return to Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Belarus (as before 1939). What would have been left after that would have been the real Ukraine, Kievan Rus, a free country, neither an American, nor a Russian colony, with its own people, language and culture, and its Church granted autocephaly. Instead of that, we have imperialism, tragedy and well over a million dead.

In February 2022 the British Secret Service at GCHQ predicted that the war in the Ukraine would last two to three weeks. So much for ‘intelligence’ services. Following the prophecy of Elder Iona of Odessa, I originally thought that it would end in 2024. I was wrong, I misinterpreted. The former Defence Minister Shoigu said 2025. He too was wrong. How can we explain that the war is now in its fifth year?

Firstly, some would say that the length of the war has been caused by Russian naivety, weakness and incompetence. That is certainly part of it. President Putin admitted his extreme naivety at Western duplicity between 2014 and 2022.

His naivety reminds me of that of the Tsar’s government in 1914. It made the very naïve error of attacking German Prussia, under pressure from France and Britain. These were the two countries which had invaded Russia in 1854 and which stabbed Russia in the back in 1917 by betraying their best friend, the Tsar, and so ensuring that the Bolsheviks came to power and then bled the Russian Empire. Russia’s argument was with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not with Germany.

Some say that Russia should have taken Kiev back in 2014, or at least in 2022. Weakness, incompetence? I do not know, but they must also play a part. Several Russian generals were imprisoned for corruption.

Secondly, there is the fact that by April 2022, Russia was no longer fighting the Ukrainian regime, but the whole of NATO and its completely militarised EU. Ukrainians, ‘to the last one’, had to die as proxies, but with huge amounts of NATO money, arms and tens of thousands of mainly NATO mercenaries. That stretched everything out much longer, as this became a war of attrition against NATO, leaving Russia with huge amounts of NATO arms to destroy. That takes time.

The Western technique is to outsource its wars, to toss others into the fires it starts. As far as it is concerned, the dying must be done by Ukrainians, and if they are willing, Poles (over 10,000 dead NATO Poles so far), the Baltics, Georgians (they refused), Romanians and Moldovans (also refusing) and now they are trying to recruit the Armenians to die for them.

Thirdly, some say that President Putin is going so slowly in order to save the lives of Russian soldiers, of whom at least 200,000 have already died or been seriously injured. Perhaps that is true. After all, the Ukrainians have lost nearly 2,000,000 killed and seriously injured, as they sadistically use their troops as Soviet-style cannon fodder.

Fourthly, there is the question of strategy. The original Russian aims never were to occupy the Ukraine, but to liberate the Russian eastern part of the Ukraine from the ongoing genocide there by Kiev and to demilitarise and denazify the Ukraine. Instead, as a result of the Russian failure not to regime-changing Kiev at the outset which brought further NATO aggression, it is having to demilitarise and denazify the whole of the West, that is, the whole of NATO.

And some say that for the denazification of the West to happen, Russia will have to wait for the Western peoples to overthrow their US-imposed, Globalist elites, formed by the cocaine-sniffing, pedophile or pervert Nazi Epstein Syndicate. That is taking many years. Since 2003 and the French and German refusal to invade Iraq, the US has replaced the French and German elites with US-trained elites, who form the Epstein Syndicate, as also in Moldova, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, the Baltics etc. (The British elite has been in the US pocket since 1956). The US regime-change/elite replacement programme failed only in Slovakia and Hungary. You can always tell where the regime-changed – the new US elites all speak fluent English, like Macron and Merz, Sandu and Tusk.

CB: When will the war end?

FA: Who knows? President Putin has said ‘soon’. This year? What do I know? Though, if I can be ironic, it is said that no European war can end until Italy, and most Eastern European countries, have changed sides, and the UK has gone bankrupt. The latter happened in 1916, which caused the British to betray Russia and sell Palestine, all in order to get help from Zionist bankers and issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and then in 1941, which caused the half-American Churchill to sell out Britain to the US. Today it is happening again. So maybe we are not far off.

CB: Why has the British government been so Russophobic? I mean, it invented Litvinenko and then Salisbury, long before the Military Operation began in 2022.

FR: The Russophobia of the British Establishment began in 1814 when Russia defeated Napoleon and then liberated Paris. The ensuing jealousy and panic at a strong Russia resulted in the Anglo-French invasion of Russia in 1854, the Victorian invention of ‘the Great Game’, the British-financed Japanese War against Russia in 1904-5, the British-orchestrated overthrow of the Tsar in 1917, which backfired and brought the Bolsheviks to power, and then Churchill’s 1945 Operation Unthinkable, which was a proposed Anglo-US-Nazi invasion of the USSR.

I have the impression that the Western Europe elite, especially the German, wants revenge for the Soviet victory over Nazism in 1945. This is because they are all basically ideological Nazis, as we can see in all the recent British Prime Ministers. For the British elite, it is all about revenge for not routing Russia in 1856, at the end of the so-called Crimean War, and then jealousy. The British Establishment lost its Empire, so the Russians must suffer. The Establishment are bad losers, for they lost the Great Game which they invented.

CB: I think you agree that the vice of the British is hypocrisy, double standards. What do you think is the vice of Russians? You can be honest with me!

FA: It is the untranslatable Russian word ‘Хамство’, ‘Khamstvo’. For Non-Russian readers, this means great rudeness, but even more than that, it is self-centredness, abruptness, breathtaking contempt for others, arrogance, ignorance and a feeling of racist superiority. Khamstvo is why Russia is today hated by the western Ukrainians, Balts and Poles.

Like everything else, Khamstvo existed before 1917, but it developed greatly under the Soviet system, after the murder or expulsion of the old White Russian cultural elite. For example, as you will recall, in the USSR a good job was considered one where you could steal a lot from your employer. Since the Soviet State had stolen everything from the people, the people considered that they had the right to steal back. ’Normal’, as the Soviet word says.

You see it in people like Fr Andrei Tkachov, the anti-woman Ukrainian priest, now much promoted in Moscow, who upsets people with his sweeping generalisations and insults issued on TV. He has no idea of tact and diplomacy and justifies himself by saying that he is just ‘frank’. He can only see black and white. There are many poorly-educated priests like that. That sort of priest is a bully and you see in Russian churches how they make women cry at confession and during sermons and seem to enjoy punishing others. A little power makes these people crazy. We had one such Russian convert priest here a few times some years ago. A very jealous type, he made two women cry, so I asked him not to confess any more. Thank goodness he left.

As you know, in Russian you even have a verb for the ‘Хам’, the rude person, which is ‘Хамить’. To translate it as ‘to be very rude’ does not even begin to express the idiocy of it. A typical such person is a Russian driver who in heavy rain soaks pedestrians by driving fast, near the pavement. Such people have absolutely no consideration for others. So it is not just extreme rudeness, but thoughtlessness, lack of any culture, being badly brought up, the ‘I spit on you’ attitude as in the Russian expression: Мне наплевать.

Another example was a friend in Odessa in 2017. A woman who had been going to church all her life, she had broken her right hand, which she had in a sling. She went to church and made the sign of the cross with her left hand. A typical ‘Kham’, who knew nothing about Church life, shouted to her rudely, swearing at her, and told her how to make the sign of the cross properly with her right hand. And then there is the old woman, the babushka, who seems to guard the entrance to every Russian church, so she can curse badly-dressed visitors who come in. It is all Khamstvo. ‘Без предел’, no limits, as you say.

This was also the attitude of the Stalinist State and I have seen senior Russian bishops do it as well. You know the sort who behave as feudal lords and have brought three priests in Russia to suicide in the last year alone. If the British are hated for their hypocrisy and resulting perfidy, the Russian Church has committed suicide through its ‘Khamstvo’ everywhere, inside and outside Russia, above all in the Ukraine. Most of its bishops have made themselves hated.

CB: What do you think will happen to China and Taiwan, given US preoccupations elsewhere?

FA: Taiwan will one day return to China, probably quite naturally, without military means, which is what over 50% of the Chinese in Taiwan want anyway. Taiwan has been part of China for millennia. The so-called ‘Taiwanese’ are Chinese. The nationalism of some in Taiwan is petty and artificial (how can you be loyal to a country that is not real, like Taiwan, Belgium or for those who live in the east of the Ukraine to the Ukraine?). Economically, Taiwan already depends on China anyway.