Category Archives: Western Europe

Russia’s Defeat of the European Delusion: From Old England to New England

Foreword

With panic and lunatic rhetoric, the Brussels and London elite are now developing fantasy schemes. These consist of spending their non-existent money, or else stolen Russian money, on rearming themselves against an equally non-existent ‘Russian threat’. Trying to intimidate and zombify the Western European public, from the now electricity-starved Baltic statelets to Finland and Sweden, ‘surrounded by Russian submarines’, from Germany to France and the UK, and even from once-neutral Switzerland and to impoverished Southern Europe, the paid Western European media are inventing and developing mythical narratives of ‘Russian threats’. The belligerent elite and their media do not want peace, they want war. Once impoverished Western people have been intimidated, the elite believes that they will pay even more tax to it. But the US no longer believes the lies of that elite. The US wants to rid the world of the cocaine-riddled actor Zelensky and replace him with the politician Timoshenko. Only they are not the ones who will get to choose.

Part One: Western Europe and Russia

The Underlying Russophobia

The Western European elite has always been anti-Russian because Russia is the nearest target, rich with natural resources, and so is the easiest option for expansion and pillage. The ‘Drang nach Osten’, the ‘Onslaught towards the East’ is the ambition of the whole elite. Today it still suffers from a delusional fantasy, born in the virtual world where it lives. Having fought almost to the last Ukrainian soldier, this delusion is to declare a ‘ceasefire’ in the Ukraine without Russia, not consulting the winning side, to win the war with a pathetically weak army, obsolete arms and no money, and to have peace talks and peacekeepers only in order to keep the war going. For them ‘Peace is War’. It is as if Hitler in early 1945 had offered peace terms from his bunker: ‘If you declare me the winner and withdraw, then I will stop fighting’. The incompetent elite offers only the continuation of their already failed Ukrainian fantasy. The only hope for the peoples of Western Europe is to withdraw from the failed Imperialist project, of which NATO and EU are the outward symbols, and to find new leaders.

The Decomposition of the European Delusion

We are witnessing the unravelling of the millennial Imperialist dream and so the decomposition and fragmentation of Western Europe. However well-masked, the founding ideology of Western Europe has always been Nazism, ever since the 11th century Crusades, and like the whole Non-Western world, Russia has always opposed Nazism. And now the US has at last realised that it has all along been used as a dupe to continue the Western European elite’s project. As regards the Ukraine, the French Macron, a typical narcissistic pseudo-intellectual, preaches the violent dream of a new racist Crusade as in 1854, Blackrock’s German agent Merz continues to commit suicide as in 1945, and the UK Starmer et al are capable only of imagining propaganda terrorist operations, dramatic PR, but strategically irrelevant, like the disaster at Dieppe, the Dambusters attack, or the hubris of Arnhem in World War Two, repeated at Bucha, in the disastrous 2023 counteroffensive, at Krynky, in drone attacks on Russian refineries and homes in Moscow, Belgorod, Rostov and Kursk.

The Tribal Rivalries of Western Europe

Western Europe is at a turning-point. Isolated and squabbling with one another, its elite is set against the whole world. The post-World War II settlement with its NATO and EU is over, as all the old institutions are crumbling. The fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were the first signs, then the reunion of the two Germanies, Brexit, failed EU centralisation, which trampled over every European nation and culture, the crazy attempt by Western Europe to extend into Non-Catholic and Non-Protestant Eastern Europe, even into the Ukraine, and finally the suicidal defeat of NATO in Europe’s Second Crimean War against Russia in the Ukraine. All this is giving rise to the revival of old rivalries. Who will lead Europe? France, Germany or Britain? Who will be the last emperor? Macron who imagines himself as Napoleon, Starmer as Churchill, or Merz as a new Bismarck? It is all sheer fantasy. They have come to believe in their own lies. Peace between the political and economic tribes of Europe will be guaranteed by Russia and the USA, which are far greater than all these midgets combined.

Russia and the Third Defeat of the Combined West

During its millennial history the Russians have defeated many enemies, only one of whom, the Mongol-Tartars, came from the East. All the others came from the suicidal West. These were the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, the Swedes, the British, French and Turks in 1854 in the Crimea, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in 1914, and the three invasions from the Combined West: under Napoleon, the French and the 12 Nations; under Hitler, the Germans and the 5 Nations; under Obama and Biden, the East Galicians (‘Ukrainians’) and the 28 Nations. This last effort at conquest used the Ukraine as the proxy battering ram to destroy Russia, but failed miserably, although it took Russia over three years to defeat all of NATO and Western Europe, though not the USA, which has retreated, seeing the obvious coming rout. After this final defeat of suicidal Western Europe will come collapse and the foundation of a New Europe, most interestingly for us of a New England. England has been awaiting refoundation and resurrection for nearly a thousand years. Let us look back.

Part Two: England and Russia

The British Assassination of England

The ‘British’ were assembled and appeared in 1066. They were composed of all the scum of North-Western Europe, all the worst Viking, Norman, Fleming, Breton and Frankish bandits. They have always been anti-English, massacring the Old English in the years after their invasion, calling them ‘Anglo-Saxons’, ‘peasants’, ‘villains’ and ‘plebs’. The British, who took their name from the no less sadistic Romans and their Imperialist name for these islands, ‘established’ themselves, and then extended their sadism to the Celtic peoples in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, ethnically cleansing everywhere. After massacring them, the British then began to massacre others in Europe, notably French, later Germans, more recently Russians, and at the same time peoples in the New Worlds, in the Americas, the Caribbean, India, China, Africa and Oceania. Always, however, the English were the first victims of the British and remain so until this very day. Only today they are victims of mental and spiritual massacres, those of self-censorship (wokeness) and brainwashing, not of physical massacres.

Old England

There was once another England. This was pre-British or, if you prefer, pre-Norman, England. Naturally, like all societies it had a social hierarchy, but those at the top and those at the bottom were basically the same English-speaking Anglo-Celtic race, together with the genetic heritage of pre-Celtic peoples. Relations with the purely Celtic peoples were delineated by borders, to the west by Offa’s Dyke and then the Irish Sea, to the south-west by the River Tamar, to the north by the Roman-built walls. A high point in the history of Old England was the saintly King Alfred and his immediate successors, who assimilated the Danish and Norwegian Viking minority by accepting their voluntary baptism and brought unity. There was no place for racism here, the outlook was international, England was part of the concert of nations. Notably, King Alfred had been to Rome as a child, used diplomacy, recruited many helpers from the Celts and Continental Europe. He sent alms to Jerusalem and India, and sent merchants to the ports of Continental Europe and as far as the White Sea.

The British Assassination of Russia

In 1916, facing bankruptcy, the British Establishment saw that it was losing the War in Europe, for which it was itself in part responsible by not mediating peace between the two Continental sides. Its only way of winning would be to involve its US ‘transatlantic cousins’ in the war. Having contrived to bring down the Tsar’s Russia in Saint Petersburg and obtain huge loans from Zionist bankers in New York, all was set for the fateful events of 1917, including later the Balfour Declaration, as demanded from New York. Russia was assassinated in the assassination of the Russian Royal Martyrs. They were martyred by the British/Norman Establishment, the New York banksters and the jealousy of treacherous Russian aristocrats, so-called ‘liberal democrats’ and ‘Constitutionalists’. Today in Britain it is the same ‘Liberal Democrats’ who are opposed to Russia, though almost all Conservatives and Labourists share the same prejudices. They also continue to want to co-opt the USA as their catspaw, as they did in the First and Second Wars and under the sick and foolish Biden.

New England

A close friend of the saintly King Alfred was the righteous King of East Anglia, St Edmund the Martyr – who was assassinated by the Vikings/Normans. Through his sacrifice he became the Patron-Saint of England and remains so to this very day. St Alfred the Confessor and St Edmund the Martyr are the symbols of any future National Liberation and National Cultural Revival, of a Freed New England and a Freed New English People and Culture. Freed, that is, from the British/Norman Yoke, from the Oligarchic Establishment and its State propaganda mouthpiece media, which, despite people’s heroes like Hereward the Wake or Robin Hood, have zombified the masses, feeding them on bread and circuses since the century before last. However, for freedom to come, attention has to be paid to healing England and the English People, and this means rejecting any temptation to interfere in the affairs of others. Attention must be paid to Altar, Throne and Cottage, to Faith, Government and People, for England to become once more a nation in the concert of many nations.

Afterword

In its paranoia, the British Establishment which still dreams of and even still lives in its Imperial past, is obsessed with its Victorian Great Game fantasy. Therefore, it is constantly inventing fake Russian plots against itself: the MI5 poisoning of Litvinenko, the Malaysian aeroplane Flight 17, downed over the Donbass by Kiev in 2014 and blamed on Russia, the MI5-poisoned Skripals in Salisbury, fake Russian cyberattacks and fake Russian spies are all myths, ‘narratives’, invented in self-justification. Moreover, the Establishment still wants revenge for its failed invasion of the Crimea in 1854, which was so disastrous that it led to the fall of its government of the time, and for the failed British coup d’etat in Russia in 1917. Those of us who are believers, despite the CIA infiltration of the Russian Orthodox Church here and its bishops who demand that Russian troops leave the Ukraine, know that all that is hidden will be revealed. The Truth will out. Here are fearful words of warning to the corrupted British and to the Western European elite: You are only punishing yourselves, for God is not mocked.

The Western European Elite Isolated

The Western proxy war in the Ukraine continues, though it is now more or less without the US, which is tired of losing so much money in that entirely unprofitable project. Thus, it is now a Western European proxy war. It seems as though the US will next abandon the equally absurd and loss-making NATO, which Russia has all but destroyed anyway. And the Ukrainians are running out of soldiers to die. Meanwhile, Zelensky has said that he will quit, providing he gets more money. ‘Give me the money and I will go away’. This is typical of a narcissist, whose sense of entitlement is such that he can only be compared to a spoiled brat. Given the new attitude of the US, Zelensky now has to find more dupes to exploit. And the dupes are queueing up for him in Western Europe. This is especially so in the UK, where the proud Establishment is still living in the delusional fantasy of Imperial greatness, although dead long ago, and in vainglorious Napoleonic France, where this fantasy is also shared.

Why do such delusions still exist? Sadly, the greater the empires of the past – the British and the French – and the longer ago they began (in Britain in 1066, in Capetian France a century later), the greater their delusions in the present. Moreover, the British and, in theory, the French, came out as victors in 1945, though they were victors only on paper, their victory was Pyrrhic. In reality, the British had begun handing over their Empire to the US as early as 1916, according to Milner’s Round Table plan. This plan was to destroy the Tsar’s Russia and then use the US as a catspaw to prolong British Imperialism. However, all that was good in the Tsar’s Russia, State-regulated Capitalism and free healthcare and education, survived in the USSR. It proved unvanquished. We clearly see that continuity today – Russia is still the largest country in the world and the largest economy in Europe. The Tsar’s Russia, with even its flag, is rising from the dead. Nemesis is coming for those who tried to destroy it.

The Western European elite has now isolated itself from both the Russian Federation and the New USA. There is no more ‘Collective’ West, for only Zelensky and the warmongering Europeans want to continue their war. Thus, that elite has made itself even more irrelevant and laughable in the eyes of the rest of the world and of its own non-zombified peoples. The future German Chancellor Merz (whom 71.5% of German voters do not support) and the unelected ‘Brussels Empire’ bureaucrat, Empress von der Leyen, have both expressed that isolation very eloquently. As the USA prepares to lift sanctions against Russia, the self-harming and very unpopular EU and UK elites (with about 20% of support) are applying even more sanctions to further destroy their own economies. Given the hostility of the Western European elite to both its Great Power neighbours, east and west, and the complete absence of any positive foreign policies or strategies, what possible future can they have?

First of all, we have to understand why the Western European elite refuses to grasp reality, whereas the USA, under Trump, has finally grasped the reality, that it has been willingly deceived by Kiev and its own former, very corrupt elite. The reason for the obtuseness of the Western European elite is because it is profoundly stuck in that above-mentioned thousand-year-old rut. This comes from belief in its snobbish and arrogant prejudice of its own mythical superiority, that somehow, mysteriously, ‘The West is Best’, that is, ‘We are best’. Conversely, the USA has, at worst, only a 250-year-old mentality of superiority, arguably, it may only be 80 years old, going back only to 1945. After all, we should not forget that the greatest ally of the USA in the nineteenth century was Imperial Russia, indeed Russia probably saved the US Union during its Civil War. And both countries fought together against Germany in two World Wars as allies. Are we returning to that once more?

Thus, the US elite is throwing off that mentality of superiority, which it took on from Western Europe, especially from the British elite. However, in Western Europe we can see how that anti-Christian mentality of superiority was shared by its most important leaders during the 1940s. For example, Hitler hated his neighbours, the Slavs (he slaughtered 30 million of them in his holocaust) and the Jews, just as they did during the Teutonic Crusades. Churchill hated ‘blacks and browns’, Africans and Asians, his imperial neighbours. As for De Gaulle, he hated his neighbours, the Arabs, just as they did during the Crusades against the Holy Land. Typically, by the end of 1940 all the Roman Catholic countries in Europe were run by Nazis. It can be said that this Nazism, the hatred of neighbours, is the common ideology of the Western European elite. Look back to Mussolini in Italy and Ethiopia, the Belgian Leopold in the Congo, the Dutch in the ‘East Indies’, the Spanish conquistadores, or the Italian Columbus.

But what will post-Yalta Western Europe be replaced by? Surely there needs to be a New Yalta? The Old Yalta was 80 years ago and is no longer relevant. A New Yalta would be attended by the New Big Three, Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi (instead of Churchill). ‘Eastern Europe’ (in fact the eastern half of Western Europe) is already making its choice, in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, even in former East Germany, probably in freed Romania next May and, as riots take place against the EU in Sofia, probably in Bulgaria too. Others will follow them. Thus, most of ‘Eastern Europe’ is already deciding on its future – it is in free trade and shared cultural contacts with the Russian Federation. Independent of Russia, it will also be independent of the EU. Western Europe also needs to return to and reintegrate the rest of Asia or, if you prefer, Eurasia. The people want it. After all, Europe is a fake Continent, it is part of Asia and all ‘Europeans’ came to the European Peninsula from Asia.

In other words, the future of Western Europe is also to be with, though in no way under, Russia, that is with the rest of Europe, half of which is precisely inside Russian borders. Today the symbolic head of Western Europe, the elderly and ill Pope of Rome, lies close to death, like his Religion in Western Europe, as also the Protestant groups in Western Europe, which broke off from the Popes, and which are now also dying out in pedophilia. This is also deeply symbolic. Is there a viable alternative in Orthodox Christianity? True, parts of both the Russian Church have been infiltrated through hatred-preaching ‘Orthobro’ bishops and the Greek Church through bribes, but there are other Orthodox Churches, which are free, not subjugated to the USAID of Biden. The other Local Orthodox Churches can help Western Europeans return to their roots and identity. Here is the chance for Western Europeans – to return to authentic, ancestral ‘European values’, from Christ, Who also came from Asia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Turning-Point of 2025: The Self-Humiliation of the Western European Elite

Foreword: The Great Delusion

‘The West defeated Russia in the Cold War’. This is the greatest delusion and myth that the West has entertained since 1945. In 1992 the West deluded itself and thought that ‘history had ended’ in its own ‘victory’. In reality, the West never defeated Communism, rather Communism, having inevitably failed economically, turned into Nationalism, both Russian and Chinese. The fact that Marxist materialism failed, which had been predicted long before, does not mean that Capitalist materialism, greed for profit, would succeed. Marxism was wrong about Marxism, but it was right about Capitalism. Russia, freed from Communism, became State Capitalist, as it had been before the British regime-change of 1917, when it had already attained a 85% literacy rate and electrification and would have been the world’s greatest power by 1950. China too has returned as a Great Power, State Capitalist, as it had been until 1840.

Four Speeches and Vice-President Vance

Four speeches have marked my life because they were visionary. The first was the Peace Speech of President J. F. Kennedy in June 1963. Two months later came the famous Martin Luther King ‘I have a dream’ speech. The third is the Harvard Speech of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in June 1978 and the fourth was given outside the USA, by the American J.D. Vance in Munich just now, in February 2025. The last speech shook the elites of Western Europe, but was loudly applauded by ordinary Europeans, glad that someone was at last allowed to tell the truth in public and not get arrested by the more or less Fascist European ruling class. That ruling class remains feudal and its structure reflects the medieval ruling pyramid, header by the Pope, now replaced by the Infallible Ursula von der Leyen.

This fourth speech was when the US Vice-President, one who consciously chose to become a Roman Catholic and is a great supporter of the much-persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church, berated the Western European elite for its anti-democratic and anti-Christian practices. This speech marks the divorce between the USA and the militant and warmongering Western European elite which includes and sponsors the Ukrainian elite, but not, for example, the Hungarian and Slovak elites. The Ukrainian elite, backed by the Western European elite and led by Zelensky, is now blocking peace in the Ukraine. Trump recommends that Zelensky flee to France, so that peace can come there and so that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, who are dying every month, will live.

Meanwhile, at the North-Western End of the Asian Peninsula

The North-Western Peninsula of Asia is called Europe and is just over 10 million square kilometres in area. The Eastern half of that Peninsula lies inside the three East Slav nations, which consist of the European part of Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. The Western half of the Peninsula, divided into some 40 countries, lies outside those borders. However, the Eastern part of the Western half, with its many Slav peoples, is culturally closer to the Eastern half than to the Western part of the Western half. Thus, the far Western part, or quarter, of the Peninsula forms the 21 countries of what is the real ‘Western’ Europe. Those countries are populated by the Germanic peoples, mainly in the north, Romance peoples, mainly in the south, and small numbers of others, Celts, Basques and Maltese.

The one-thousand year period of the ‘Western European’ domination of the rest of the world, at first only of the Near East and Eastern Europe, which much expanded from 1492 on, is now over. The colonial empires of countries like Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium etc are finished. Only relics like Greenland, New Caledonia, Tahiti, the Falklands, Gibraltar are left. The USA and Russia have ended them and the future of the whole of the Western half of the Peninsula has been decided in Saudi Arabia, outside Western Europe, for it is now irrelevant. Its governing elite deserves this humiliation. How can the peoples of ‘Western Europe’ be supported after their elite’s defeat in this great geopolitical shift, a defeat which simply mirrors the defeat of the Soviet elite?

The Realistic People Versus the Ideological Elite

Today’s USA is run on realism, that Russia is a Great Power, whereas the Western European elite runs on ideology – ‘the West is Best’. Ideologies are always blind to reality because they try to fit reality into a mere ideology. This is why ideologies always break down. They are unrealistic. Such was the case with absurd Nazism and Marxism. Now it is the case with Western Imperialism. Realism shows us that Russia was a Great Power in 1914. The West then tried to destroy it five times. The first time was in 1914, the second time was in 1917, the third time was in 1941 and the fourth time was in 1991, the fifth time was in 2022. Each time the West failed. This time Great Power Russia has defeated not just the junta in Kiev, but all of NATO, which is now all but dead because the USA is leaving it.

Unlike Western Europe, the USA has a Constitution, which begins ‘We, the people…’. Therefore, the USA, founded by Europeans fleeing oppression, has at last been able to sideline the old, anti-democratic US elite, which was previously wholly supporting the treacherous, oppressive and authoritarian Western European regimes. Both elites promised the defeat of Russia, that its economy would be ruined and ‘the rouble would be turned into rubble’ and that the USA and Western Europe would, as the Nazi Eurocrats intended, break up Russia and seize and exploit its vast assets. Such fantasies could only have been expressed because the elites were living in a virtual world of fantasy narratives, of delusional wishful thinking, that is, of propaganda lies which they had persuaded themselves to be true.

EU/UK Hysteria

Reacting to Trump’s policy of actually talking to Russia, the hysterically Russophobic EU Commissariat is having a nervous breakdown. Just like Kiev, the EU cannot take part in any peace talks with Russia because the EU wants war. As for the Ukraine, it held ‘peace summits’ and refused to invite Russia, so why should the Ukrainian dictator be invited to future Russian-American peace talks? In any case. Kiev has still not rescinded the executive order of October 2022 which actually forbids it from peace talks with Russia. Now the authoritarian EU has just implemented its sixteenth package of sanctions against Russia! Surely if fifteen packages did not work after three years, a sixteenth will not either. All it will do is bankrupt EU countries even quicker. Such is their suicidal path.

As for the crazy idea of EU/UK peacekeepers in the Ukraine, why would Russia, which decides on this, as it holds all the cards, accept ‘peacekeepers’ from countries who are at war with it, economically at war and also supplying arms and mercenaries to the enemy side? And you certainly do not need peacekeepers, when you already have peace, as Trump promises. Why does the leadership of Britain and France want war and threaten interventions with non-existent troops? The British Army, just like the French, has twice as many horses as tanks, and its Navy has more admirals than ships. It is a fact. Another fact is that Alexandre de Rothschild runs the bank clerk figurehead Macron in France and shady figures in the City of London runs the figurehead of Starmer, who got the job because of his wife.

Towards International Peace

Both Starmer and Macron have now become prisoners of their own rhetoric and promises. Macron was clearly defeated in elections last year, but refused to resign despite the French people and the most popular Party, the National Rally. In the UK the new Sovereignist Reform Party, the British equivalent of the National Rally, now has 212,000 members, having overtaken the Conservative Party with 130,000 members on 26 December, and now heading to overtake the Labour Party within three months with its fast-declining 309,000 members. And Reform is headed by Trump’s best friend in Britain, Farage. Europe’s biggest former Imperialists, like the British, and the much-mocked liars of their media have yet to understand that the Unipolar, Westcentric world is over. And it really is.

When will the crazed Western European elite, centred among the unelected and overpaid Politbureau of Commissars in Brussels and the hated minority governments (both elected by 20% of the electorate) in London and Paris, all of which betrayed the genocided people in Eastern Ukraine, understand? As the elite will never stop believing in its own lies, it will have to be replaced by a new governing class, come up from the peoples of Western Europe and representing the peoples’ interests. Its first action should be the renewal of diplomatic ties with Russia and then the lifting of all suicidal sanctions against Russia, quashing the absurd criminal charges against the Russian President. Then it would need to support vital agreements such as those below, since the only real players support them.

Agreement In Europe

An overarching Eurasian Security Agreement needs to be reached. After the imminent regime-change in Kiev, which has been blocking peace, in this way peace can be reached for the New Ukraine in its new borders, probably governed by President Roman Medvedchuk without the warmongering dictator Zelensky. There must also be a stop to the nasty persecution of Russians who live in the Baltics. In return, the East Slavs will agree to stay within their borders in the eastern half of Europe, unless attacked again by the highly aggressive West, as has, unfortunately, so often happened, five times in the last eight generations. There must also be peaceful self-determination referenda in ex-Yugoslavia, which can be implemented once the Western world stops meddling there.

In this way, the EU and NATO, their sell-by dates expired long ago, exactly in 1992, can be collapsed. All their member-countries can then retrieve their sovereignty and their own currencies and form friendly and voluntary regional trading associations, if they so wish, also joining BRICS like normal countries Their hugely wasteful military budgets, standing on average at about 2% of GDP, could then be cut in half. They do not need armed forces; nobody wants to invade them – they are all bankrupt anyway. Together with the renewal of trade with Russia and the import once more of cheap energy, cereals and fertilisers from Russia, Western Europe could reindustrialise and renew its crumbling infrastructure, roads, railways, utilities, and social, health and educational systems.

Agreement Outside Europe

The USA should close down all its military bases and interests in all of the Eastern part of the Western half of Europe, in countries like Poland, the Baltic States, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, ex-Yugoslavia and also in Germany and the Nordic countries. Similarly, it should close all its bases and clear out its occupying forces in Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, as well as in Japan and Thailand, where they have no reason to be and are not wanted. The US has its own sphere of interest – in Northern America. The return of the US military back home from Eurasia would help it stop the rise in its huge national debt of 36.5 trillion dollars, which is increasing by three million dollars every minute. The USA is bankrupt because of its attempt to rule all.

A war has been raging in West Asia, as the ‘Middle East’ is called in the West. The USA has to find a solution to the problems caused by its satellite, Israel. How can Israeli troops be removed from the Lebanon? How can the native people of Gaza live in conditions fit for human beings? When will Israeli persecution of the native people on the West Bank, which it occupies, cease? How can the bloodshed stop in what used to be Syria? The key here is perhaps in Russian guarantees to Iran. Beyond this, with Russian guarantees to North Korea, the US could withdraw its troops from South Korea. With Taiwan at last allowed to return to China, the US could be allowed by Russia and China to absorb Greenland and Canada, if their peoples accepted this by free referenda, as Russia has held in the Ukraine.

The Future and the Church

In the latest news, we can see the possible future of the old Soviet Ukraine, depending on referenda results. All the east and the south will pass to the Russian Federation, as will Transdnistria also. Most of North Bukovina (Chernovtsy) will return to Romania and possibly the small eastern part will go to Moldova in return for Gagauzia, if Gagauzia wishes to join the Russian Federation. Zakarpattia (Subcarpathian Rus or Ruthenia) will either go entirely to Hungary or else will be divided between Hungary and Slovakia, as before. As for the provinces of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivivsk and the western half of Ternopol, they will return to Poland. This would leave the New Ukraine, Kiyivska Rus, with the City of Kyiv, Kiyiv, Zhytomir, Rivne, Volyn, Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, Vinnytsia, Khmelnitskyi, and the eastern half of Ternopil.

In Church matters, surely there is only one solution. For the New Ukrainian/ Kiyivska Rus Church, to receive autocephaly, as also the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland), should have their own Autocephalous Church. And Moldova must have its own autocephalous Moldovan Orthodox Church too, according to a Tomos signed jointly by Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and Patriarch Daniel of Bucharest, as this is joint territory. If Moscow wanted one day to grant autocephaly to Belarus, that may happen. That would stop any uncanonical invasions of Russian canonical territory by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It would also make twenty Local Orthodox Churches. Such decisions might at last bring a resolution to the long-standing uncanonical situation of the Diaspora.

Afterword

The Western European elite dinosaurs dwell in the past with its EU and NATO. They cling on to it, but the USA now looks to the future. There the generational shift has happened. This has exposed the corruption of USAID, of the National Endowment for ‘Democracy’, of the FBI and the CIA. The absurd Russiagate scandal will be exposed as a British attempt at regime-change in the US, covid as a Deep State error, as also the recent scandal of Epstein and the old one of the Kennedy assassination. Corrupt Western governments and their media are being exposed. Trump will save face by agreeing to the (Russian-created) New Ukraine and peace, declaring it as his victory. Let him. The future is clear – the Big Three, China, Russia and the USA, with a BRICS-composed Security Council and seats for the Big Three as for India, Africa, Brazil and Muslim Indonesia, and one seat for the ever-squabbling tribes of Europe. This is the future.

Twelve Questions and Answers on the Ukraine January 2025

Foreword

The conflict in the Ukraine has been reshaping the world ever since 2022. First of all, there was mass emigration from the Ukraine to Europe by both genuine refugees (millions of these were evacuated to or fled to Russia) and others who just wanted to take advantage of Western political ideology and propaganda. Paying for them was bankrupting for Western European countries. Even more bankrupting were the suicidal, self-imposed, anti-Russian, in fact anti-Western, sanctions. Then it became apparent that the Western world was now isolated – China, India, Latin America and Africa, which know all about Western colonialism, either directly took the Russian side, or gave no support to the West. The old ‘Third World’, called by the politically correct name pf the ‘Global South’, became the Global Majority, the 87% of the world supporting Russia.

The development of the Russian-founded BRICS, now with Indonesia, was vastly accelerated after Western sanctions and illegal confiscations in 2022. Suicidal Western sanctions against Russia also vastly accelerated the boom of the powerful Russian economy, which soon became the fourth largest economy in the world, overtaking both Germany and Japan. It was clear that the post-1945 settlement, the world led by the US and Western-dominated, was over. This was confirmed by the US election results, which chose the nationalist, but not imperialist, Trump, who had survived two assassination attempts. As a result of the self-imposed collapse of Western European economies, unable to print dollars like the US, whose governments, after depriving themselves of cheap Russian gas, oil, fertilisers, cereals and minerals, began to collapse.

The latest disastrously managed Establishment regime to collapse is the Canadian, notorious for supporting Ukrainian Nazis. The propagandised and brainwashed peoples of the Western world are finally waking up and refusing to vote for their corrupt and authoritarian oligarchic elites, from which they no longer receive any benefit. Instead of Russia being regime-changed, which is what the Western elite falsely claimed was to happen at the beginning of 2022, Western regimes regime-changed themselves, starting with the rejected Biden. These regime changes were due to the curse of their support for Kiev, which seems to have the Midas touch in reverse. Now national-patriotic parties of left and right are taking over Europe, with the agenda of the overthrow of EU tyranny and the reset of relations with Russia after its victory in the Ukraine.

  1. Why does Trump want to end Biden’s Ukraine project?

Like most Americans, and like all successful American businessmen, Donald Trump does not like losers. That is why he got the US out of the war it had lost in Afghanistan. And this is why he is ending Washington’s next losing and bankrupting project in Kiev. He is a dealmaker, not a loser, especially not in a distant and notoriously corrupt country, in which the US has no strategic interest. Biden was surrounded with people who had an ideology to impose. As a pragmatist, Trump now has to manage the defeat of the Biden ‘Project Ukraine’, making it look as far as possible like a triumph for himself. Whatever we may think of Trump with his many obvious faults, he is a pragmatist. The Biden ideologists are now leaving the sinking ship.

Trump’s pragmatism and America First nationalism are the strategic logic why he wants to control his side of the Arctic. He would like to get the ten provinces and three territories of Canada to join the USA. To some that seems like a fantasy for the moment, especially in the form of one single state, but it may happen. Canada is only just over a tenth of the USA in terms of population. And Trump may very well purchase Greenland, just as the USA purchased Alaska before. How much would Greenland’s 50,000 people want to vote yes to US rule in a referendum? $100,000 each? $5 billion in all? This is a fraction of the $177 billion that the US taxpayer has been forced to waste in the Ukraine. Tiny Denmark’s colonial claims are totally irrelevant here and Greenland long ago left the EU.

Greenland with Canada could create 64 states in the USA and consolidate Northern America into one single geographical, political, economic and cultural entity, the largest country in the world, with US ownership of the Panama Canal and ‘The Gulf of America’ reinforcing that nationalism. This Trumpian policy of US national security behind a sphere of influence is exactly what President Putin is doing – securing his borders. And Trump, not Biden, is already the de facto President, ruling from Florida. In effect, whether he realises it or not, Trump is preparing Northern America to enter the multipolar world of BRICS, as one of six Great Powers: China, India, Russia, Brazil and Latin America, South Africa and Africa, and then Northern America/USA.

Finally, there is the humanitarian side of this immense post-Soviet tragedy. Knowing that the Kiev Ukrainians have lost over a million troops, killed and wounded, and the eastern Ukrainians, Chechens and Russians have lost over 100,000 troops  killed and wounded, who would not want an end to the conflict? There will be so many Ukrainian (called ‘Russian’) brides, as there is no-one to marry. The men are dead and crippled.

The country has been destroyed, all on account of the West Ukrainian-Hitlerite fantasy that the Ukraine could win a conflict launched against a Superpower, a conflict that the Ukrainian people had clearly rejected before it even began, just as they had rejected NATO, both then and now. Only the panicking EU and UK elites and Zelensky and his gang in Kiev want the conflict to continue. Neither Putin, nor Trump wants this. Above all, the Ukrainian people do not want to be, and never wanted to be, victims of this obscene tragedy of power politics. 84% of them want peace talks to begin now.

  1. Once Trump hands over the Ukraine project to Europe, why don’t the EU and the UK simply take the place of the US as sponsors of the Kiev regime?

There are two reasons why they cannot do this.

Firstly, Western Europe is financially bankrupt. It has no more to give, neither from its depleted arms stocks, nor from its empty bank vaults, especially not the UK.

Secondly, it is morally bankrupt. On its conscience, together with that of the Biden regime, is the war crime of having had killed or maimed over a million Ukrainian men, soon from the age of eighteen up, told to fight and die for the West by their racist masters ‘to the last Ukrainian’, and all for nothing, certainly not for the Ukraine. What does it matter to them if Slavs die? They are subhuman anyway….

The Western world is going to get a new elite for whom the conquest of Kiev is not existential, unlike for the present elite of the legacy parties and the legacy media. They have staked everything on the loser in Kiev in their desperate attempt to expand their ramshackle EU empire eastwards. Instead, the prosperous Russian Federation is consolidating Eurasia, moving westwards, retaking Orthodox land, and other countries will soon come into Russia’s economic orbit, including Germany, whose now faltered success is dependent on Russia. Victory in the Ukraine is only the start. The new European elite will, like Trump, be composed of those who are opposed to the Globalists’ proxy war in the Ukraine.

This is already happening with leaders like Orban, Fico, Meloni, Georgescu, Le Pen, Weidel of the AfD (supported by Musk), and Farage. It is exactly the same process Europewide. For good or for ill, the national-patriotic parties in Western Europe have grown from support of 5% to 10%, from 15% to 20% and are now polling 25% to 30%. Who knows how far they will expand further? In most Western European countries, these new parties are already the second biggest parties in their respective countries, like the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK. These are at present heading towards becoming the biggest parties.

The anti-English Starmer regime will collapse, just as the hated Scholz regime and that of ‘Governor’ Trudeau have collapsed and then that of Macron will also collapse. All were supported by only about 20% of the electorate, though by 100% of the heavily censored legacy media, which has told the most outrageous lies from the start. The other regimes will fall in Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland, which have all betrayed their neutrality. Ultimately the US puppet regimes in Poland and the depopulated Baltics will fall, once the Washington and Brussels string-pullers of the puppets fall, as their proxy war against Russia is defeated.

  1. Why are the Russian armed forces making a frontal attack on the Ukrainian forces? Why do they not take the easy and fast way and simply go round the side, invading the Ukraine from Russian territory in the north, going round the back of the very strong Ukrainian fortifications, built up by NATO for eight years since 2014? This is what the Germans did in 1940, when they went round the side of the impregnable Maginot Line and so took France within a few days, instead of within a few years and with relatively few losses.

The frontal attack is taking place because of Russia’s three clear aims, none of which includes taking large amounts of Ukrainian territory, unlike the German aim in France in 1940. (When you are by far the largest country in the world, as Russia is, nearly thirty times the size of the Ukraine, you have no interest in taking a little more territory). Let us recall what the three Russian aims are, as they were clearly stated on 24 February 2022 and have been restated ad nauseam, though few have listened. These three aims are: the liberation of the two Russian provinces of the Donbass, which had been genocided by Kiev for eight years before 2022, and the demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukraine.

True, the first aim had to be expanded from two eastern provinces to the liberation of the four easternmost Russian provinces. This occurred after the Kiev regime illegally tried to cut off water supplies to the Crimea which go through those two additional provinces. (The Crimea was part of Russia until 1954 and voted massively to rejoin it by internationally-observed referendum in 2014). In order to ensure those water supplies and because of the massive support for Russia in the two additional south-eastern provinces, which had been part of Russia until 1922, in 2022 they too returned to Russia.

True, the second aim of demilitarising the Ukraine was achieved in just a few months in 2022, but then NATO modified it into the aim of Russia having to demilitarise the whole of NATO. This was because NATO supplied Kiev with massive amounts of NATO equipment and half-trained huge numbers of Kiev troops in using that equipment in Western countries. This is why the conflict has taken three years, and not three months.

The third aim of denazifying the Ukraine, that is of ensuring the freedom there to use the Russian language, to live according to Russian culture and to practise the Orthodox Faith of the majority of Ukrainians, has been occurring in a tragically different and cruel way to that hoped for. It has been occurring through the deaths of tens of thousands of Neo-Nazi, Kiev regime, elite troops, like those of the Azov battalion. This is denazification, the Nazis are literally dying out.

  1. Will there be a stalemate in the Ukraine?

This is delusional, a fantasy, wishful thinking, propaganda, a ‘narrative’, or in plain English, a lie. There can only be a stalemate in the Ukraine, if Russia wants one. And it does not. Since the Kiev regime is crumbling and heading for collapse, there is and there can be no stalemate, only Russian military victory. Russia decides the military outcome, not Western fantasy-writers and politicians who only talk to each other, never to Russia, which alone will decide the outcome.

  1. Why does Moscow not assassinate Zelensky?

Moscow does not act like the CIA, assassinating leaders of other countries. Apart from the immorality and illegality of such an act (President Putin is a lawyer by training and always acts very cautiously and legally, in self-defence), why assassinate your greatest ally? Zelensky’s foul-mouthed incompetence has been the guarantee of Russian unity and success. He was selected by the CIA for his acting ability as a talented PR frontman and to deliver the Western scripts provided to him. He has no grasp of either political or military matters, as we can see from his disastrous PR-motivated, British-planned ‘offensives’ in Kherson and invasion of Russia via the tip of the Kursk province. He is therefore the CIA’s greatest gift to Russia. His fierce opposition to peace talks means that Russian forces will continue to advance for as long as they want.

  1. Will Moscow enter into peace talks with Kiev?

This question is purely theoretical, since in 2022 the Kiev regime outlawed negotiations with Russia under pressure from Western countries, notably from the USA and the UK. The disgraced ex-Prime Minister of the UK, Johnson, a proven liar, played a crucial role as Washington’s errand boy in forcing Kiev to break off the nearly successful talks in Istanbul and then forbidding negotiations in early April 2022.

Let us recall that the Ukrainian leaders of the Donbass in eastern Ukraine tried to negotiate with the Western-installed regime in Kiev for eight years between 2014 and 2022, but US and EU-controlled Kiev always refused to talk seriously and failed to honour any agreements. The last Russian peace offer, made in June 2024 on behalf of the eastern Ukrainians, was as generous as it will get (see below). The longer Kiev refuses to negotiate, the harsher the Russian conditions will become.

  1. What are Russia’s current peace terms?  i The people of the Crimea and the four Russian provinces, which have already officially been taken into Russia, must be recognised as for ever Russian citizens. (Condition one). ii The Ukraine can never join NATO and can only have very limited armed forces. (Condition two – demilitarisation). iii The authorities in Kiev must cease all persecution of the Russian people, language and culture and also of the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, returning its churches, seized by violent thugs. (Condition three – denazification). iv Illegal Western sanctions against Russia and trumped-up criminal charges against Russian politicians must be withdrawn immediately. v Democracy and freedom must be restored on all remaining Ukrainian territory, with free political parties, free elections and an end to censorship and the reign of terror of the CIA-trained SBU secret police.
  2. What will happen if Kiev refuses these conditions and continues the conflict to the end?

In this case, Russia will take back the whole of the formerly Russian eastern and southern half of the Ukraine, including cities like Kharkov, Poltava, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa. This will cut Kiev off from the Black Sea coast, making what remains of the Ukraine into a landlocked country, and linking Russia to Transdnistria. This could create pro-Russian protests in Moldova and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The hated, US-installed regimes and elites there may be pushed out by popular pressure, just like the anti-Russian French puppet government in Georgia, which has already been pushed out. Russian victory is going to encourage a lot of suppressed pro-independence and anti-NATO feeling throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

  1. In that case, will there appear a new Ukrainian state?

Definitely, and possibly even two Ukrainian states. Once the two small Romanian and Hungarian parts of the western Ukraine have been returned to Romania and Hungary, there will remain Eastern Galicia. This consists of the provinces of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western half of Ternopil (the rest of that province belongs historically to Volyn). This could either become part of Poland again, or else even become a new independent Roman Catholic state of some four and a half million people, called Galicia, and belonging to the EU. It is not part of the Orthodox world.

The rest of the old ‘Ukraine’, a name invented by Austrians at the end of the century before last together with the Ukrainian flag, will perhaps return to its dignified and historic name of ‘Kievan Rus’. This country could be similar in size to Belarus to the north, though with a population two times larger, of 18 million. This will be quite independent of NATO and NATO’s economic arm, the EU, neither of which, in any case, will last long in Trump’s Western world. That is a minimum. It could be bigger.

  1. What will the future of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the schismatic groups be after the Russian military victory?

This is the question which concerns us far more. As for the rest, we are just outside observers of the political and military facts, however tragic they may be.

The schismatic sects will wither and die. The small but very violent, State-created and US-financed Constantinople group under the puppet Dumenko and the tiny group under Filaret will both die out. They will both have to return the churches that they stole from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. And this real Church, under Metropolitan Onufry, will have to receive autocephaly from Moscow. Ukrainian hatred for Russia and Patriarch Kyrill, who has appeared to support this tragic war and then uncanonically ‘defrocked’ some 60 members of the clergy who were opposed to it, is now such that the gross insensitivity and chauvinism of Muscovites have made this autocephaly inevitable. There must be a truly independent Ukraine, not a Western puppet.

As we have said from the outset, winning the war is not the same as winning the peace. Hence the need for a real Ukrainian State, where people can live in peace and democracy, speak Ukrainian, and live freely, without fear of Zelensky’s censorship and secret police. By backing this war, the tragic events of which we have been observers, the administration of the Russian Church has compromised itself before the faithful clergy and people of the Church of all nationalities, not least Russian. Naturally, this autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church will then look after its Diaspora in Western Europe and elsewhere, which already has 100 parishes.

  1. If Moscow has to cede autocephaly to the Church under Metropolitan Onufry, what consequences could that have for the rest of the Russian Church?

Firstly, the Russian Church still has to undergo full ‘destatisation’. This word does not mean independence from the State – the Church received that in 1992 after the collapse of Communism. Then the attitude of the Russian State to the Church became one of indifference, rather than hostility. ‘Destatisation’ means the end of a mentality of dependence on the State. This mentality gradually evolved after the Church was deprived its own Patriarch in 1700.

Then it became an Imperial Church, with its caste of paid clergy and professional choirs, leading to clericalism, and the destruction of eucharistic life and resulting community/parish life, replaced by private services of intercession and memorial. Membership of the Church is by definition voluntary. An attitude towards the Church as some kind of welfare state, for which the people have no responsibility, is not healthy. This mentality of dependence has in one way or another lasted ever since then.

However, it is also true that this mentality of reliance on the State had appeared even before that, as is shown by the Old Ritualist schism in the 17th century. The fact that the schism was about a State-imposed ritual, is highly significant, for it is the State that divides through rituals and ritualisation, because ritual, like the State, is all about the outward, not about the inward and Faith. The Faith of the Old Ritualists was identical to those who followed the new ritual, which in any case was identical in 99% of its acts.

Such destatisation today means decentralisation, that is, the granting of autonomy or rather autocephaly to others. Others means any Orthodox group numbering 100,000 or more, which lives on territories outside the Russian Federation and has at least four bishops and monastic life. The Russian Church administration in Moscow has to catch up with the division of the Soviet State, which over thirty-three years ago divided into fifteen independent republics. In other words, the Moscow administration is still thinking in centralised Soviet terms.

The second consequence is that the Church administration, which is responsible, must cleanse itself of the wave of corruption and homosexuality, which has come to infiltrate certain senior groups among the clergy, especially since the fall of the USSR. From then on Russia became the victim of ‘Wild East’ capitalism, characterised by the Western-style oligarch mentality. This was promoted both inside and outside Russia by the CIA and its subdepartments. This mentality came to affect the Church administration. My friend and colleague, the late Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, who died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow in 2020, was of the same opinion.

Here is the harsh truth about what has become necessary after the Russian Church administration has so discredited itself over the last thirty years. The Church administration now has to regain the lost trust of the Orthodox people, clergy and monastics everywhere.

  1. How could the Russian military and political victory in the Ukraine affect the rest of the Orthodox Church?

If the concerned elements in the Moscow Church administration are ‘destatised’, then the same freedom of destatisation can at last come to Constantinople, which suffers from the same dependence on politicians (only in its case on US politicians) and an equal level of corruption and homosexuality. As Trump abandons the Ukraine, he abandons Constantinople. Trump is a disaster for Constantinople, just as he is for the unelected EU Commissars who detest him. At that point, with both Moscow and Constantinople deservedly humbled, a real and very welcome and long overdue Unity Council of the whole Orthodox Church and a return to the canons become not only possible, but, at last, real.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Long March to the Inevitable Local Church of Western Europe

I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

Martin Luther King, 1968

Introduction

One of the main hopes in my life has been Church unity and to see a united Local Church here one day. From the outset I could see that the forces of division were very strong. However, I still did not want unity at any price, unprincipled unity, but unity in Truth and in Love. Such unity is only possible once the Church administration is free of politics and respects and tolerates others. It is unity in Christ. Ignorance, narrowness and judgementalism are to be cast aside. However, the existence of a Local Church cannot be an end in itself.

We have the example of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).  It was a very brave move to establish the OCA, but over 50 years on we can see that it has been a failure. We have to learn from that. As in that example, all the impediments to establishing an authentic Local Church anywhere, in our case, in Western Europe, are ideological, top-down problems, which come from the elite. These impediments are all by definition divisive, not unitive, and therefore cannot build a Local Church. There are three impediments, namely:

Nationalism

When I was young, any young person who approached Greek, Serbian, Romanian or Bulgarian Orthodox churches and asked to join was told, at best, to ‘go away’. ‘You are not of our nationality’. The only Orthodox Church which would accept those not of its nationality was the Russian Church. Unfortunately, the Russians were divided into three anti-unity factions for purely political, reasons. They concerned differing attitudes towards the then Soviet regime in Russia. Nevertheless, we had to be patient. We had no other choice, despite the squabbles imposed top-down on pastors and people. For example, one of these Russian groups was based around a personality cult with indecent undertones. I refused the priesthood there and we left. We sought Christ, not sensualists. It collapsed, as soon as the object of the cult had died. However, we realised that our task, to help bring unity to these three groups, could only be successful once the cause of division, the Soviet regime, had fallen.

In North America, there seemed to be some hope in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), founded in 1970, which claimed to be the Church for all Orthodox in North America. However, it attracted relatively few of the Orthodox population, only about 10%. This was because it was unable to accept different nationalities, languages, calendars and customs, as it too fell into nationalism, namely, into American nationalism, and tried to impose ‘Americanism’ on all. In other words, it replaced Greek, Russian and other nationalisms with American nationalism and so could not become a Local Church for all. So some criticised it as ‘Coca-Cola Orthodoxy’, as they found much of it turned not towards the spiritual, but towards the lowest common denominator. Some there cruelly imposed the English language and made it obligatory, they had a Protestant spirit, an anti-monastic and modernistic ethos, and created spiritual emptiness, failing to provide the people with spiritual food.

Ecumenism

In the 70s and right up to the early 2000s many Orthodox bishops, some under political pressure, others because they were just superficial careerists and bureaucrats and had little faith, were engaged in a purely political movement called ecumenism. Now, the idea that Orthodox should be good neighbours with Roman Catholic and Protestants is of course accepted by all, except by the pathologically ill (see below). However, ecumenism, as such, is a political ideology, involving freemasonry (I was once promised the priesthood, if I agreed to become a freemason). Ecumenism involved compromises with the Faith, known as modernism, liberalism and, in general, ‘new calendarism’. This is completely unacceptable to anyone with an Orthodox consciousness and who is rooted in our Orthodoxy of the monasteries, pastors and people.

Typically of the ecumenists, many Greek bishops then declared that there was no difference between different Christians; as phyletists (racists) they sent English people away and instructed them to become Anglicans; in the 70s one Russian Metropolitan openly gave communion to Jesuits, whom he admired for their wealth and power (later he died in the arms of a Pope), giving rise to speculation that he had been a secret cardinal; another aristocratic ‘protopresbyter’ celebrated the liturgy in France with the filioque (!), so that ‘the Catholics will not be shocked’ and suggested ‘structures in waiting’, that is, there was no need for a Local Church, as we should wait to be absorbed into Roman Catholicism. true, the ecumenist danger has diminished over the last decade or so, but only to be replaced by yet the latest deformation, described below.

Pathology

The third and no less divisive ideology which impedes the development of a Local Church is neither nationalist, nor ecumenist, but pathological. This stems from immigrant inferiority complexes or else from the insecurity complexes of neophytes. The first complexes come from the second and third generations of immigrants who suffer from insecurity and want to make out that they have some exclusive ideological truth, which condemns all others who do not confess it. This is highly divisive and will never lead to the formation of a Local Church, which requires not intolerance and, even less, fanaticism, but openness to all. Such people are concerned only with exclusivism, to the point of the esoteric. The second set of complexes come from a pathological and unChristian need to condemn those who come from the same original background as the neophyte.

I remember a comment about one Dutch convert to Orthodoxy who came from a strong Roman Catholic family: ‘I am not sure if he is Orthodox, but he certainly is anti-Roman Catholic’. This complex illustrates that it is pathological and can reach proportions of hatred and jealousy which reach psychiatric depths. Such people never belong to the Orthodox Church, but always to sects and are capable of making captive parts of the Orthodox Church into schismatic sects and cults. This can be seen most obviously among old calendarists, but not only. Groups which have lost their ethnic base, like ROCOR and Antioch, and have to recruit from unstable converts, can be prone to such psychopathological fanaticism and exclusivism. Fortunately, such groups are very small and do not impede the majority, who are concerned with the millions of mass Orthodoxy.

Conclusion

What is the situation today? The pathological attract the internet generation of incels and other lonely and often unstable individuals, and not families. There is clearly a psychological disease here. This trend will not continue, for only families are the continuity of the Church down the generations. As for ecumenism, it died after the fall of Communist persecution and nobody talks about it today, though modernism and liberalism are still alive, especially among the old generation. As regards nationalism, the situation has changed.

Unlike fifty years ago, today, ironically, it is the Russian Church which has turned to nationalism and for now is in schism, largely turning its back on Non-Russians and on a Local Church. The problem is that pastors have been replaced by politicians and monks by managers. Now others, especially the Greek and Romanian Churches, which are in any case far larger than the Russian in the Diaspora, are generally turning away from nationalism and towards local people. Here there is at last hope for the future Local Church of Western Europe.

 

Who Will Create a Multinational Local Orthodox Church in Western Europe?

Introduction

Millions of Orthodox Christians live in Western Europe and are under some thirty bishops. And yet we have no Local Church of our own, unlike the far fewer in any of the twelve Local Churches in Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Albania, the OCA or for that matter in the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Why?

Constantinople?

For a very brief period in the mid-1980s, we hoped that the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople might create a united Local Orthodox Church for the then hundreds of thousands of Orthodox, 99% immigrants or descendants of immigrants, in the countries of Western Europe. Given the political paralysis of the far more numerous Russians and the purely political ideological division between the three warring Russian immigrant groups, ultimately caused by the Soviet atheist regime and the oppression of a hostage-Church inside the USSR, as well as personal passions, the Greek solution seemed possible. The Greeks had a whole network of bishops in Europe and unity. All was possible.

Sadly, the Greeks were largely only interested in playing politics and Greek nationalism, known as ‘Hellenism’, implemented by bishop-bureaucrats. ‘God only understands Greek’, as they used to say and still say, when they told Non-Greeks to ‘go away’. In 1989 Constantinople consecrated an ambitious Non-Greek bishop, but he had to pay a $20,000 bribe out of his pocket for the privilege. It all ended up very badly and he was soon suspended in a scandal. And now it is happening again: an ambitious young convert-careerist, though not in the same Patriarchate, has messed up and created a scandal. We have seen it all before. It is tiresome when a young know it all does not learn from the mistakes of others.

Moscow?

After our long-awaited victory with the reconciliation of the largest part of the Russian emigres with the Church inside Russia in May 2007, for which unity we had worked tirelessly for over two decades, we had new hopes. Sectarianism had at last been suppressed. From 2007 to 2017 we hoped against hope that the reunited and reconciled Russians would use their God-given opportunity to create a new Local Church in Western Europe. This would naturally have meant not repeating the error which the Moscow Patriarchate had made with the ‘OCA’ in the USA, that is, it would have to encourage and involve the co-operation of all the Local Churches with Diasporas in Western Europe, not least the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This would require diplomacy, bringing all on side, not isolationism and exclusivist political and racial ideologies.

Sadly, the Russians responsible messed up big time and chose the wrong way. For example, the main Moscow bishops appointed in Paris went from bad to worse. One was openly homosexual, the next openly lived with his wife and child and was alcoholic, and the next was a ruthless political careerist who backed a schism. Then came Russian isolationism after the schismatic US Greek project in the Ukraine and, among the emigres, full-blooded schism and sectarianism. Russian nationalist ghettoes, increasingly more extreme, more pathological and therefore ever smaller and crazier, were formed. The new level of conflict in the Ukraine and associated persecutions and defrockings of clergy, who have a different political opinion from the official hierarchy. All this, amid the hypocritical silence of the emigres, has made the situation dire.

Bucharest?

Politically-inspired Greek and Russian infighting in Church matters in Western Europe seems petty and irrelevant in the face of the massive Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox immigration to Western Europe of the last 15 years. This now numbers well over 4 million on official statistics (1), in nearly 1,000 parishes, soon with 12 bishops. Unlike Russians and Greeks, of whom only about 2% at most ever set foot in church, Romanians and Moldovans massively practise their faith. Moreover, Romanians speak a Latin language written in a Latin alphabet, they are generally very open, welcoming and want English in their services for their children. And children there are. As one Greek bishop told me: ‘When you go into a Greek church in London and see children, you know that they are Romanians’. They are some of the children of the 200,000 Romanians who live in London alone (there are nearly 600,000 Romanians and Moldovans who officially live in the UK, no doubt more unofficially).

All other Orthodox are outnumbered by them by perhaps five to one. The mantle has then passed to the Romanians, as both Greeks and Russians have failed to meet the challenge of setting up a new Local Church. The Romanian Church is by far the largest Church in Western Europe, bigger than all the others put together, but although autonomous, as the newest it is also the poorest, with the weakest infrastructure. With such numbers there is an opportunity. However, the same mistakes can still be made all over again. In other words, the Church can be made into a nationalist organisation, which will be irrelevant to the UK-born children of Romanian and Moldovan immigrants. We who belong to the Moldovan part of the Church, meaning that we have Russian liturgical customs and the old calendar, are especially conscious of this. Let us not repeat the errors of the Russians, who have mistreated Moldovans as second-class citizens for so long, just as they mistreated us English Orthodox in exactly the same way for so long.

Conclusion: The People’s Orthodoxy and Leadership

What is certain from what we have seen over the last fifty years is that there will never be a Local Orthodox Church in former Roman Catholic and Protestant Western Europe until ideologies cease. It does not matter whether these ideologies are racial (not to say racist), or political (Russian right-wing or Greek left-wing). All ideologies are divisive. Only the grassroots People’s Orthodoxy can defeat such top-down ideologies, but for this they also need leadership. The absence of a Local Church is the result of this failure.

Note 1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_diaspora#:~:text=Therefore%2C%20the%20number%20of%20all,countries%20where%20they%20are%20indigenous.

The Future of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe

Introduction: Orthodox Church Immigration to Western Europe

Since 1917 there have been three large-scale waves of immigration of Orthodox Christians from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. These have been: the Russian-speaking, mainly since 1917, though in four sociologically very different generations, the Greek-speaking, mainly since 1950, and the Romanian-speaking, mainly since 2000. This latest immigration is composed of well over four million Romanians with a million and a half Moldovans, probably six million people in all. Nearly half of these now live in Italy, Spain and Portugal, since Romanian is very similar to those languages. This recent immigration dwarves all previous Orthodox immigrations to Western Europe, not just the Russian and Greek, but also the much smaller ones, like the Serbian, the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Macedonian, the Bulgarian, the Antiochian (Arab) and the Georgian.

The Greek-speaking (Greek and Cypriot) immigration has remained very closed to others and remains stuck in its ethnic identity, but its leaders also have very strong pro-US politics. Both these factors alienate nearly everyone else from it. It does not in general and cannot in reality attract many native Europeans to its religious practice. As regards the Romanian and Moldovan immigration, it is still too early to say whether it will attract others to it in any number, though there are some promising signs of openings to others, as a result of its youthfulness, its ten bishops, including a French one, and some Non-Romanian clergy and people. The Romanians are helped here by their Latin language and by being very open and welcoming, but the infrastructure remains weak.

The Russian Immigration

What of the oldest, most political and most complex immigration, the Russian-speaking? In four waves, this consisted of anti-Bolsheviks from pre-1917 Russia, anti-Stalinists from pre-1945 Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, those from the small, largely ethnically Jewish, dissident intellectual immigration of the 1970s and 1980s, and those from the post-USSR but still Soviet immigration, especially from the Baltic States, Kazakhstan and Moldova. These waves of immigration are sadly divided into three different and quite disjointed ‘jurisdictions’ with separate episcopates, one of which (ROCOR) since January 2021 has officially decided to be in schism with and not concelebrate with one of the others (WEA). (See below).

  1. The MP

Firstly, there is the largest jurisdiction, that of the Mother-Church, the Moscow-based Moscow Patriarchate (MP), which is 99% of the whole Russian Church, mostly in the ex-Soviet Union, but also has eight bishops in Western Europe. This is organised under a Paris-based Exarchate and its people come from all over the ex-Soviet Union, especially from Moldova and the Baltic States, but also from the Ukraine, though in the last two years many Ukrainians have left it to help found yet another group of over eighty quite separate new Ukrainian Orthodox communities, mainly composed of Ukrainian refugees (most of whom appear not to be baptised Orthodox – the Orthodox have stayed in the Ukraine or in Eastern Europe). This MP Exarchate has been patterned by a number of Exarchs and bishops, who have embarrassingly compromised themselves in some way or other and so have met with failure.

One of the great current problems here is the dramatic events now going on in Moscow against the background of the war in the Ukraine. Here, ‘traitors’ are being tried by Church courts. These include the once senior Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachov), the former Exarch in Africa, who is under suspicion of various misdeeds (1). If treachery to the Russian State is the real charge, then there must also be bishops in the very divided New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (see below) who must also be trembling. Astonishingly, several of the latter have from the outset publicly called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukraine and openly supported anti-Russian US policies and persecuted pro-Russians. If there is one thing that Russians cannot support, it is treachery.

  1. b) The WEA

Secondly, there is by far the smallest group, the Paris-based Western European Archdiocese (WEA) with only three bishops, whose aristocratic founders from Saint Petersburg created it in the 1920s. This elitist intellectual group is now very small outside Paris. It has either not been able, or perhaps not wanted, to take off and expand outside the intellectual group. At the present time, most believe that its often elderly leaders will die out within the next generation. Essentially it has only three church properties of its own and these are all in Paris. The death or removal of two individuals would hasten the takeover of those properties by the much larger MP and its inevitable absorption of the small remains of this group.

  1. ROCOR

Thirdly, there is the New York-based ROCOR, which was formed over 100 years ago, in 1919 and has its own Synod, now of only thirteen active bishops. In Western Europe it has four bishops. By 2001 its first generation had essentially died out. Thus, in order to survive it had to reinvent itself. A few very elderly individuals, including its own Metropolitan, were expelled in what was essentially a coup d’etat. Having taken over, the new Synod, which had accepted large numbers of new immigrants from the ex-USSR, was then forced to reconcile itself with Moscow. However, it was also recruiting converts, especially in the USA. Unfortunately, it purposely recruited some very strange and right-wing extremist converts, many of whom it made priests and even bishops, putting them into oppositions of power. These now form a very powerful group and are harshly persecuting those who are Russian-speaking, pro-Russian and anti-schism.

Apart from about 150 communities, many of them very small, mainly in the USA, and about 30 communities in Australia, the other main centre of ROCOR is its 70 or so communities in Germany, where it has many historic and beautiful churches and a large flock, with both clergy and laity nearly all from the ex-USSR, especially from Kazakhstan. As well as these churches, it also has a few historic churches in Switzerland, two historic churches (recently taken from the WEA) in northern Italy and one in Brussels. Elsewhere it has virtually nothing, apart from some very small and often unstable communities, making some 300 communities in all and at least 50,000 people. It is clear that the MP is waiting to take over the historic churches in Western Europe from the declining ROCOR and add them to its Exarchate of Western Europe. The death or removal of two very divisive and very aggressive, US-trained individuals in Western Europe, who have very strong anti-Russian political backgrounds and connections, would hasten this process.

At the present time the New York Synod is very divided, not least about its heretical programme of rebaptising other Orthodox, in defiance of the teachings and practices of the Russian Church and of the whole of the Orthodox Church. Although there are three Russian bishops against a break with the MP (they have already broken with the WEA part of the MP), there are three bishops for, and the other seven are fence-sitting. We expect further events.

Conclusion: The Future

Most countries in Eastern Europe already have their own independent Local Orthodox Churches. It seems quite likely that the small Orthodox population (3% ?) from among the eleven million people of the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and from Nordic Finland, whose language is related to Estonian, will form their own Local Baltic Orthodox Church. All these Eastern European countries have strong historic Russian connections and a current Russian presence and historic churches. Similarly, Eastern European Hungary, to which Carpatho-Russian Transcarpathia and its 600 Orthodox parishes may soon return, may also obtain its own Local Orthodox Church. This is just like the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, the main part of whose traditional flock also consists of Carpatho-Russians.

This would leave a geographical West of Europe, with an eastern border stretching from Norway down to Sweden, Germany, Austria and Italy, enclosing the at present twenty-one countries of Western Europe, with its population of 400 million and area of 3.5 million square kilometres. This has a population of some 10 million nominal Orthodox, about 40 bishops and perhaps 2,000 communities. If they banded together into eight multinational dioceses and worked towards forming their own Local Orthodox Church, they would then form the fourth largest Local Orthodox Church, after the Russian, Romanian and Greek.

These eight dioceses could cover the territories of: Italia (Italy, Malta and San Marino); Iberia (Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar); Germania (Germany and Austria); Gallia (France, Wallonia (Southern Belgium), Luxembourg and Monaco); The Isles (the British Isles of England, Scotland, Wales etc, as well as the island of Ireland); Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland); the Netherlands (the Netherlands plus Flanders (Northern Belgium)); Helvetia (Switzerland and Liechtenstein). The main task here would be to maintain Orthodox and their descendants in the Faith, protecting them from the surrounding ocean of ever more aggressive Western secularist atheism. However, it would also be for these dioceses to conduct missionary work among the native peoples of their territories, though in this profoundly atheist (ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant) region, the results of that work would be modest, for sadly few want real Orthodox Christianity, often preferring at best a virtual version of podcasts, internet nonsense and negativity.

Note:

  1. The retired Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachev) of the ROC said the upcoming trial against him will be a betrayal of the Church and Fatherland” and “all who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”.

    Former African Exarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Leonid called the upcoming hearing on his case in the Supreme All-Church Court “a betrayal of the Church and the Fatherland” and said that “all those who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”. He wrote about this on his Telegram channel.

    According to him, with the upcoming trial, “we have passed the line of realisation of good and evil”.

    “Now everything is possible if you have uncontrolled power in your hands,” the retired bishop said, without specifying whom he meant.

    The hierarch is convinced that his work in the African Exarchate was “the first breakthrough since 988,” and Gorbachev appreciates its results very highly.

    The hierarch also noted that his trial benefits the Vatican and is “giving up one’s own people”, and that all those involved in it are “traitors”.

    The metropolitan threatened to “provide details afterwards,” adding that he “did not want this”.

 

 

 

A Seventh Bishop for our Metropolia

Our three million-strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Patriarchate of Romania now has seven bishops with the addition of the newly-consecrated Bishop Nectarie of Brittany (western France). The eight bishops who will meet in their local Synod are: Metr Joseph of Western and Southern Europe, Bishop Mark of France, Bishop Nectarie of Brittany, Bishop Silouan of Italy, Bishop Athanasie (Italy), Bishop Timothy of Spain and Portugal and Bishop Theophil (Spain).

The Church of Romania also has a second one-million strong European Metropolia, of Central and Northern Europe, consisting of three bishops: Metropolitan Seraphim of Central and Northern Europe, Bishop Sofian of Germany and Bishop Macarie of Sweden. We knew Metr Seraphim quite well when he was a young priest in Paris in the 1980s and he came to our home in Paris several times.

Talk now is of the need for an eighth bishop, a Bishop of the British Isles and Ireland, to join our Metropolia. A candidate will be considered at the autumn Synod in Bucharest. This question is going to become increasingly important, as more and more Moldovan clergy and people in their parishes all over Europe transfer to the Patriarchate of Romania.

 

Will the Russian Orthodox Church Be Forbidden in Western Countries?

At the Peace Forum in Rome on 23 October, President Macron of France spoke in front of an audience of many Church leaders, including Metr Antony (Sevriuk), reckoned to be the No 2 of the Moscow Patriarchate. The President stated that the Russian Orthodox Church (both the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR) is manipulated by the Russian State.

https://www.cath.ch/newsf/selon-e-macron-la-religion-orthodoxe-est-manipulee-par-la-russie/

This was said in front of many other Orthodox clergy, including our friends from the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and our own Metropolitan Joseph (Pop) of the Romanian Orthodox Church, whose Autonomous Metropolia numbers 4 million Orthodox in Western Europe. (This makes him the bishop with by far the largest Orthodox flock in Western Europe, far larger than the total flock of many Local Orthodox Churches). Is the Russian Orthodox Church manipulated by the Russian State, as President Macron claimed? Whether it is true or not is irrelevant, the fact is that this is the Western Establishment perception – and has long been. For them the Russian Orthodox Church is no more independent of the Russian State than the Church of England is from the British government, whose new and entirely expected Hindu Prime Minister will nominate all its bishops.

The only exception to this possibly true claim of subservience to the Russian State is the small but much-persecuted Russian Orthodox Western European Archdiocese under Metropolitan Jean of Dubna. There clergy are allowed to commemorate or not the Russian Orthodox Patriarch. The Archdiocese is where we were not allowed to stay by Metropolitan Antony (Sevriuk). Thus, highly providentially, we were safely received into the above-mentioned Romanian Patriarchal Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe eight days before the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine began on 24 February 2022.

Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch has been banned from visiting his flock in four countries through a personal ‘sanction’. These countries are the Ukraine, Canada, the UK and Lithuania. As well as this, the Russian Church has had to withdraw its bishops from Northern America (the USA and Canada) and from the UK. Bishopless churches are churches that will die out. What is to be done? You can sit it all out and wait till the war in the Ukraine is over. This appears to be the policy of many. However, that does not solve the pastoral problems in the here and now or the problems in the future, which will be even greater.

The Russian Orthodox Faith first came under persecution in the Ukraine in 2018, when the CIA with the help of Poroshenko and certain Greek Orthodox individuals who set up an uncanonical Church, so that Ukrainian Orthodox would not belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. Few fell for this trick and the new ‘Church’ failed. This year the canonical Church in the Ukraine has come under even greater persecution and was forced to declare itself ‘fully independent’ of Moscow. Of its 12,000 churches, 2,000 have been taken away from it by force and nearly all of them now stand locked and empty. The US-sponsored Ukrainian nationalist persecution resembles very closely that of the Bolsheviks.

Only recently a curious though different fate has befallen the Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia, which was declared independent by the Latvian government. It has no choice other than to accept this imposed independence. It looks as though the same is about to happen in Lithuania and Estonia. However, we note that the Russian-founded Orthodox Churches in Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and in the USA (the OCA) are not suffering from any persecution from their States because they are associated with the Russian Orthodox Church. Why? Because they are all ‘Autocephalous’, i.e. canonically fully independent.

Surely this is the way out for the whole of the Russian Church, which is not inside the Russian Federation and Belarus? In any case, the difference between Orthodoxy and Papism is surely that we do not have a Pope, that we do not claim some sort of universal jurisdiction. When a Local Church sets up a mission in another country or a country becomes politically independent from the one where the Local Church is based, and that mission is successful, inevitably, that country ends up having its own Local Church. And the new Local Church is independent of political pressure from foreign governments (and from its own government).

A Patriarch is not a Pope. We ignore any ‘Eastern Papist’ temptations or claims of any Patriarchate (e.g. the deliberate misinterpretation of Canon 28 of Chalcedon, for instance). We know that the hubris of power is always punished. We do not confess any universal jurisdiction, but missionary autocephalies, as in the Local Churches of Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonica. Let us be frank: There is room for very many to stand on the moral high ground in the Orthodox Church. If some want to compromise themselves politically or have little integrity or conscience and do not wish to stand there, that is not our business. We shall continue to stand there, waiting for others to join us, whatever the stones they cast at us.

 

 

Six Months On: The Completely Avoidable Tragedy of the Ukraine and the Curse of Nationalism

‘Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe’.

Words Attributed to Albert Einstein

 

Foreword

We have never had any doubt that the Russian Federation would win militarily in the conflict in the Ukraine, for which eventuality it had carefully prepared for eight long years. (I stress the word ‘militarily’). During that time the West continually poked the bear and then was surprised when the bear’s patience ran out – on 24 February 2022. That does not mean that I approve of anything that has happened in the Ukraine since 2014. I visited different parts of the Ukraine six times between 2014 and 2021 and my many parishioners from all over the Ukraine only confirmed what I had seen.

I could see only too well its immense problems, the corruption which led to an infrastructure, far worse even than that in the oligarch-dominated UK, and the poverty of the masses, making it poorer than many African countries. In this article I take no sides. All wars are huge human tragedies and cannot be approved of. However, I am interested in the truth, not in propaganda, whichever side it comes from. And here, as everywhere and always on this site, without the burden of any careerism I am free to be interested only in the truth and its causes and consequences for Church life.

Introduction: The Tragedy: 2014-2022

After the 2014 US-organised coup d’etat (cost to the US taxpayer = $5 billion, as officially admitted by the US politician Victoria Nuland), one thing was at once obvious. This was that the new Kiev government needed to carry out internationally-observed referenda. Then they could let the various peoples in the Ukraine, with its purely artificial, Soviet-made borders, assigned to it by the atheist monsters Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, freely decide which country they wanted to belong to. Any enforcement of the old atheist centralisation from Kiev would, as in Yugoslavia, lead to exactly the same tragedy and war as in Yugoslavia. Both amalgams, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, were hangovers from the Communist period with their absurd borders, jamming together peoples who had little in common and no desire to live in the same country as one another.

Sadly, the reality is that this current completely avoidable tragedy in the Ukraine is ‘Yugoslavia II’, that is, it the same thing again, only on a far greater and more serious scale. And here, unlike in Serbia, NATO cannot use its air force, for it will be shot down by superior Russian technology, and its army and navy are shut out.  In 2014 an internationally-observed referendum was held in the Crimea, and all went well, with a clear 97% majority choosing to return to Russia, after 60 years of enforced separation from it. However, Kiev itself refused to allow referenda anywhere, including in the Crimea. Therefore, the Kiev government, or rather those behind them who would not allow referenda, are responsible for today’s catastrophic consequences and tens and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have blood, a lot of it, on their hands. What are those consequences?

The Catastrophe: 2022-

  1. Local Consequences: The Human Cost

In 2014 war broke out in the Ukraine, specifically in the Russian-speaking Donbass, whose language and culture were oppressed and mocked by the racist centralisers in Kiev. Up to 14,000 people, including 400 children, were massacred by the Kiev authorities and the other 6 million were told to leave the Ukraine, if they did not like Kiev’s new ‘democracy’. This year, there has been much worse. Six months of conflict have now passed, though it was clear from the beginning, like it or not, that the small Russian expeditionary force had already won in the first few weeks. Their feint to the North, as if to take Kiev, locked up the Kiev military there (the same tactic as the US used in Iraq with a feint from the sea), enabling Russian forces to achieve their aims of conquering much of the Russian-speaking East and take the Russian-speaking South as far as Kherson, where they were greeted by many as liberators. This was what the Russians had openly stated that they intended doing all along, but they had been disbelieved.

Like it or not, the ensuing decision by the USA/West/NATO to send billions of dollars of their weapons, disarming their own troops, to be destroyed by Russian missiles, sometimes before they can even be unpacked (as on 24 February at Borispol Airport), is only prolonging the inevitable defeat and making the bloodshed far worse. So far the Russians and their Allies have lost over 6,000 troops dead, although over the last two months since they took strategic Mariupol, casualties have been very low, as this has largely become a war of satellites, drones, artillery and precision missiles. On the other hand, the Kiev Army has lost some 250,000, at least 60,000 of them killed, and continues to lose many hundreds of ill-trained, ill-equipped and often very young or very old troops almost every day, whether killed, wounded, or by surrender and desertion.

You should not be fighting a modern war when you do not have air superiority. Kiev does not, as most of its air force was destroyed in the first few days. It is a catastrophe and leaves widows and orphans everywhere. Every son killed had a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. The whole country is in bitter mourning. Its population is now down to 30 million. Of 6 million refugees, Russia is the European country that has taken the most, with 2 million fleeing the bankrupt Ukraine. However, 4 million others have left futureless bankruptcy for various countries in Western Europe, over half going to Poland and Germany. It costs the US taxpayer $5 billion every month just to keep the Kiev government afloat, let alone the billions of dollars of destroyed US military equipment.

Unless the 13% of the world, which is all the Western world/G7/NATO is, really wants a nuclear war to annihilate humanity, as Mrs Truss says she does, the West will just have to accept that Russia has taken back the Russian Lands within the former Ukraine. People like Mrs Truss, with her extraordinary ignorance of the basic history and geography of the Ukraine, simply do not realise that this is an existential war for Russia on its doorstep, even though V. Putin explained this quite clearly. Russians will die to win this war to free their brothers and sisters in the East and South of the Ukraine.

However, despite what Mr Johnson has recently proclaimed, no-one in the UK has chosen to pay 400% more for fuel bills, let alone die for the Ukraine, of which country few in the UK had even heard until six months ago. The result of the UK government’s refusal to buy Russian gas and other commodities and to arm the Ukraine, without consulting the electorate, which is not even allowed to elect the next Prime Minister, is soaring inflation, social disruption, strikes and grinding poverty, which will probably topple the UK government in the near future. Here is the difference with Russia. Nobody in the UK wants to suffer, let alone die, for an unknown country.

Local Consequences: What Does the Future Ukraine Look Like?

It looks something like the following – something that could have happened without any bloodshed, had democratic referenda been allowed back in 2014:

The Real Ukraine of Ukrainian speakers, the ‘Kyiv Protectorate’, or whatever it will come to be called, may take 11 demilitarised central and western provinces of the former Soviet Ukraine: Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil. Population: 11.2 million. This will be a landlocked nation, in effect a Second Belarus, with a population of just over a quarter of the 1991 Soviet Ukraine.

Russia may take the 9 Russian-speaking eastern and southern provinces: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, Kherson, Crimea (Crimea of course already rejoined Russia in 2014), Nikolaev, Odessa. Population: 14.2 million.

Poland may, with Russia’s permission, take back the 3 far western ‘Habsburg’ provinces: Volyn (though a small number in the north of Volyn might want to join Belarus), Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk. Population: 3.2 million. This is the historic ‘Ukraina’ – the word that simply means the borderlands (that are next to Poland). Clearly, this real Ukraine would have to receive some sort of autonomy within the NATO-ruled Polish Republic as a demilitarised buffer-zone.

Hungary may take 1 province: Zakarpattia. Population: 0.85 million. This is providing that its mainly Carpatho-Russian people vote for this by referendum, though, true, many have already accepted Hungarian passports. This region would also have to receive some sort of autonomy within Hungary.

Romania may take 1 province: Chernivtsy. Population: 0.6 million. This is providing that its largely Romanian-speaking people vote for it by referendum, which seems highly likely.

  1. Global Consequences: Western Sanctions Cause Chaos in Western Europe

Why is the Russian campaign taking so long, why did Russia not use 25% or even 50% of its armed forces and take the whole of the Ukraine within a few weeks? Because that is not its strategy. By its own admission Russia has never had any intention of occupying the whole of the Ukraine and its capital Kiev. Therefore, only 5%-10% of the highly professional Russian Armed Forces have been engaged in order to take back the Russian-speaking areas, which were separated from it by Marxist diktat exactly 100 years ago. In any case, most of the fighting is being done by the local anti-Kiev Eastern Ukrainians and Chechen allies, who have suffered most of the casualties.

Then there is no hurry – the Russians want to conserve the lives of their own troops and of Ukrainian civilians and to conserve infrastructure. Time in any case is on the Russian side: their greatest ally is, as is usual in Russia, General Winter. By deliberately stretching the conflict out by agreeing to provide arms ‘until the last Ukrainian is dead’, Western European governments have foolishly fallen into the trap of extending the war into the winter. In this way they will have to suffer a winter with little fuel and face national emergencies, probable popular uprisings and riots and the fall of governments. The West has been completely outwitted – by its own stupidity.

Nowhere in Western Europe is the situation as grim as in the UK. With its privatised utilities, which are in reality unregulated, the law of the jungle prevails. For example the energy price cap imposed by the French government on its State energy monopolies is 4%. In the deregulated UK, prices by January will probably have increased by 400%. This is unsustainable. Expect a universal bill boycott, already started, and food riots. In the UK, Johnson’s words of 25 August, ‘You (note, ‘you’ not ‘we’) must endure to defeat Putin’ do not work. Nobody in the UK voted for this. Moreover, in the ‘democratic’ UK, 160,000 mainly elderly, wealthier people are taking two months just to choose the next Prime Minister, the fourth in six years. The UK used to mock political instability in Italy; it had better look at itself.

Global Consequences: Sanctions and Dedollarisation

Europe’s own anti-Russian sanctions, even though forced on it by the USA, are suicidal. Bankruptcy stares it in the face. The rouble has stabilised at a very healthy 60 to the dollar (before the conflict it was over 90 and briefly went up to 120) and money is flooding into Russian coffers as the whole Non-Western world wants its oil, gas, grain, fertilisers, rare earth metals, not to mention its highly effective arms. They are available to anyone in Western Europe who does not sanction them, as long as they pay for them in the Russian currency. On the other hand, the euro has sunk to parity with, or is even below, the dollar. The conspiracy theorists are even saying that the whole conflict was created by the USA to destroy, not Russia or even the Ukraine, but the EU, notably the German economy. Probably crazy, but actually quite logical.

China, India and indeed over 85% of the world have no sanctions against Russia, indeed they basically support Russia. The West is isolated, with its manufacturing dependent on China, which will soon claim back Taiwan. And Russia and other countries are now insisting on payment for their essential commodities in roubles or in their own currencies. The world economy is being dedollarised – that is a disaster for the USA.

  1. Church Consequences

Now we come to the second half of this article, what interests us most. What are the Church consequences of the conflict in the Ukraine, especially, what is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox Church? Here the situation is grim indeed. On 25 August the Russian Church was forced to abandon plans for its Patriarch Kyrill, already sanctioned and banned from visiting the UK and Canada, to meet the Pope of Rome in Kazakhstan in September. Centralised Church authorities in Moscow had totally misread the public mood and the proposition had led to a huge scandal.

However, the misreading, or just plain non-understanding of the views of the local Orthodox grassroots, is far more generalised than this mere detail. The authorities of the formerly multinational Russian Orthodox Church has tried to impose the political views of Russia on its multinational flock. The result? Its Non-Russian flock has largely left it. This is a repeat of what happened in the 1920s when the leader of the Church then, Metropolitan Sergius, tried to enforce loyalty to the atheist Soviet State on his flock outside Russia. Result? He lost his flock outside the Soviet Union. We can see exactly the same result, all over again, in many regions of the world. For instance:

a) The Ukraine.

Few can describe the hatred felt by Ukrainians, mostly from central and western Ukraine, for Russia and Russians. They are simply boycotting the churches where the name of Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned. I speak from what I have seen. Even here, for example, Ukrainian refugees come to us and ask who our Patriarch is. When I reply that last February we were issued with letters of leave to quit the Moscow Patriarchate (its Western European Archdiocese) for Patriarch Daniel of Romania because of political persecution, they smile and say they will return to us. They feel at home with us; we are neutral. However, wherever the name Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned in church services, Ukrainian refugees, like many other Ukrainians who have already been here for some time, vote with their feet and leave. Understandably so.

Even Autonomy for the only canonical Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, that which is led by Metropolitan Onufry, is now no longer enough. It is too late. Moscow has totally lost control. It is Autocephaly that has to be granted, exactly as the saintly Serbian Patriarch Porfiry recently granted to the Church of North Macedonia. This simple message has yet to get through to Moscow, but it is a fact. Otherwise, the Ukrainian Church will simply be an empty shell. This need for Autocephaly is not a top-down case of political manoeuvrings by a nationalistic elite who want their ‘own’ National Church to command and control, as was the case of the Protestant Churches in Western Europe (e.g. the Church of England or those in Scandinavia) or the purely political group founded in the Ukraine in 2018 under the Church of Constantinople.  This is a case of the people demanding Autocephaly, it is a ‘down-top’ movement.

b. The Baltic States

Russophobia here is virulent. There are already two Churches in Estonia and there are about to be two in Lithuania because of nationalism and hatred for Russia. The US-sponsored Patriarchate of Constantinople stands behind both breakaway groups in Estonia and Lithuania. It seems to me that at the very least the three Baltic States must have their own Local, Autonomous, if not Autocephalous, Orthodox Church. Only that will stop the schisms. Again the message is clear to everyone, except to Moscow. Does Moscow really think it can weather the storms and hold on?

The situation in Lithuania is especially disastrous, where priests have been defrocked for a purely political disagreement with Moscow. This is an abuse of the canons. As our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, said to us in a recent conversation, defrocking happens to clergy for moral, financial or criminal reasons, not because the clergy disagree with their bishop about politics or, as missionaries, are defending their churches from predatory and anti-missionary bishops. Nobody in the free Orthodox world recognises political defrockings. They are not only uncanonical, they are anti-canonical. They are particularly ironical, when those who should be defrocked for molesting women parishioners or stealing money from parish funds are not only not defrocked, but receive all manner of awards!

c. Moldova

Already 20% of churches in Moldova have left the Russian Church for the Patriarchate of Romania. The conflict in the Ukraine is making Moldovans shudder. Will we be next? The tiny Russian Transdnestria was of course long ago lost to Moldova, but what about Moldova itself? It seems inevitable that Moscow will lose the remaining 80% of its parishes there to the Romanian Church. Large parts of the Russian Diaspora are also composed of Moldovans, for example some 70 of the 72 Moscow Patriarchate parishes in Italy are Moldovan. Surely they too will leave for the Romanian Church?

Already in England most Moldovans have had to leave the Russian Church because of Slav nationalism and, sadly, a certain corruption. Here too, Russian nationalism appears to have destroyed the Russian Church’s once multinational character, as everywhere in the Western world. One nationalist bishop of the Russian Church in the Diaspora actually said in public: ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. That seemed to amuse him: it did not amuse the Romanians and Moldovans, or any of the Non-Russians, present. Here there is cause for the suspension of the bishop, if not for his actual defrocking. As far as I know, Christ never commanded us to hate other races.

d. The Western European Exarchate

In 2018 Moscow at last set up a Western European Exarchate, its centre in its brand-new, purpose-built Cathedral and centre in the most prestigious part of Paris, rumoured to have cost 50 million euros. Today, the Exarchate too is shattered, seemingly destroyed by Russian nationalism. Its first head lived in the Cathedral with his wife and child, and had another vice. He was duly sent away. (Though not sent so far as their Bishop Gury in the 1990s, who did something so serious that he ‘had to go’ and freeze in Magadan, opposite the Sea of Japan). The second head, a very politically-minded and very ecumenically-minded and very young man, who has not spent any time in a monastery and who speaks no French and poor English, now lives in Moscow and does administrative things.

Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate Diocese in the UK no longer has a bishop, he is in Moscow. Few even remember who was the last Englishman to be ordained to the Russian Orthodox clergy in the UK. And the Moscow Patriarchate bishop in the Netherlands also seems to have disappeared. He got into great trouble with the Dutch government for threatening the clergy of his huge church in Amsterdam with ‘the Russian Embassy’, because, as Non-Russians, they had expressed purely political disagreement with the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the parish and about 70% of the people transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as did a parish in Italy and another in Germany. Frankly, it appears as if the Western European Exarchate had its chance and failed. Does it have any future after the events in the Ukraine? That it might become the foundation to set up a future Western European Orthodox Church, as Patriarch Alexiy II wanted twenty years ago, now sounds like a bad joke. Hopes have been dashed by those who have betrayed their pastoral duties.

e. North America and ROCOR

In the USA the Moscow Patriarchate has also lost its bishop. Its forty or so parishes are left without a leader and, it seems perhaps without any possibility of even survival through new ordinations, let alone expansion. However, in general, all parts of the Orthodox Church in North America are in chaos. The largest group by far, the Greek Archdiocese, is facing scandal and disorder with the probable deposition of its new, highly political and secularising Archbishop Elpidiphoros. The second largest group, the OCA, which has Russian origins, is facing many difficulties, mot least the behaviour of its administration in over-zealously closing churches and persecuting clergy during lockdowns. The third largest group, Antioch, sometimes called ‘The Church of the Four Families’, faces a scandal involving allegations against its Metropolitan Joseph.

The fourth largest group, quite small in fact, a Russian group, ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), faces very embarrassing accusations of defamation, precisely from a Ukrainian priest, Fr Alexander Belya. The US courts will clearly favour him, though they must first justify his allegations to find out if they are true. Several other scandals in the USA involving properties and Russian clergy who have fled it for the Greek Church are also left unanswered. On top of all this, questions have been raised about the use of the electronic signature of the late Metropolitan Hilarion of ROCOR. He was clearly very ill for quite some time, at least for a year, if not for several years, before his death in May 2022, and yet all manner of very serious documents were being issued in his name by others. His death also leaves his Western Rite group, already dissolved in England, all at sea.

Moreover, ROCOR faces huge difficulties outside the USA. In Western Europe it lost half its English Diocese, 12 clergy, 5,000 people and two million pounds worth of Church buildings, ultimately to the Church of Romania, which canonically received them all, with the blessing of Patriarch Daniel himself. In 2007 they had already lost their only two monasteries in England to an Old Calendarist Church only because their analysis of the degree of the deSovietisation of the Church inside Russia varied with that of their bishop. On top of that, that English diocese then lost another four clergy to various other jurisdictions. Although still (!!) in complete denial of this reality, ROCOR here has now largely become an internet presence. The churches that left it for the Romanian Church are full and growing in clergy and people. Its very few remaining churches are very small. Meanwhile, in Geneva it also faces yet another court case on internal matters concerning administration and very embarrassing sackings, allegedly illegal, involving its appointment of freemasons.

From 1917-1991 ROCOR existed as the free and unpersecuted branch of the Russian Church outside the Soviet Union. After the atheist Soviet Union fell in 1991, and even more after ROCOR’s long-awaited reconciliation with the post-Soviet Russian Church in 2007, many began to question the reason for its continued existence. Some felt that Providence had given it a chance to justify its continued existence as the missionary part of the Russian Church outside Russia. It had the chance to prove itself as such from 2007 to 2017. Then all was still possible. Sadly, it failed to realise its potential and openly abandoned missionary work in whole areas of the world, such as Latin America, Indonesia and most of Western Europe, and instead concentrated on trying to amass money and striving to obtain impossible-to-obtain properties gained by previous unsupported missionary work. It seems as though the once persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church.

At the same time, some of its members turned inwards and selected Trumpism, and not Christ, as their ideology. It was clear that some in ROCOR had lost their way. Having chosen not faith, but a political ideology, and one which fails to work outside narrow US Republican ghettos, and lost most of itself outside North America, ROCOR may now be obliged to retreat to North America and lick its wounds. A well-known Russian Orthodox Metropolitan wrote to me only last week and told me that he does not think that it can survive at all; ROCOR risks becoming an embarrassment to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia. This is a Church Titanic, of which Fr Alexander Belya is only the tip of the iceberg.

Conclusion: Lose-Lose?

The curse of nationalism has been lose-lose for all who have taken that particular acid bath. The Kiev government has lost by persecuting its own people and playing with several different nationalist and schismatic ‘Glory to the Ukraine churches’ and persecuting its only canonical Glory to God Church. Its false ‘churches’ have not only not created unity, but they have destroyed all remaining unity by persecuting and striving to seize the properties of the canonical Church (more parallels with the situation in the Diaspora). The Church of Constantinople has lost by playing with Greek and then Ukrainian nationalism. Western Europe has lost by playing with European nationalism (its ‘freedom and democracy’ myths) and enforcing Russophobic sanctions to cut off its nose to spite its face. ROCOR has lost by playing with American nationalism, exactly as the much persecuted St John of Shanghai prophesied. And the once multinational Russian Church has lost most of all by betraying its multinational vocation, that very vocation set by Tsar Nicholas II, with Russian nationalism, thus wrecking its multinational reputation. It will not recover from that for at least a generation.

Everyone is a loser. However, Divine Providence can and does make good out of bad. You will see and are already seeing it. Here is the possible end of schisms in the Ukraine and its opportunity, shorn of its Russian territories, to find its true identity and unite around a liberated and demilitarised Kiev. Here is the opportunity for scandal-ridden Constantinople to become a missionary Church, having understood that nobody is interested in a secular-minded, political and racist Church. Here is the opportunity for Europe, including the UK, to make peace with Russia after nearly 1,000 years of hatred based on jealousy and intolerance. Here is the opportunity for the two parts of the Russian Church in North America, the OCA and ROCOR, together with the bishopless Moscow parishes, to unite and love one another, instead of hating one another. (The apparently still unknown commandment of loving one another is to be found in the Gospels). It is all so simple. Here is the opportunity for the Russian Church, having for now lost Europe, to turn to serious missionary work in Asia and in Africa. God always gives opportunities. Sadly, men do not always take them.