‘Their psychological profile is narcissistic at best, and fully psychopathic in most cases. That also gives them an advantage, especially when dealing with weak, ignorant and easily influenceable people. But when they meet a determined pushback, they quickly become clueless and helpless’.

A Russian Commentator on Contemporary US Politicians

We report the below, without taking sides, but simply with the intention of alerting readers to otherwise unreported events in the Orthodox world:

On 27 July it was announced in Moscow that legal cases are being instituted against those Ukrainian nationalist individuals and groups who have seized hundreds of churches belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, especially in the western third of the present country. The usual technique is to send in violent criminal elements who obtain the keys to the church and then lock it up so that nobody can use it. This generally takes place while the local authorities and police stand by and let it happen despite the opposition of the local faithful. Such churches afterwards simply stand empty.

This statement makes it clear that the Russian intention is to take over the whole of the Ukraine. Moreover, this was confirmed by Dmitry Peskov, Press Secretary to President Putin who on 28 July declared that ‘the whole of the Ukraine needs to be denazified’. Since other Russian representatives have been saying much the same, it seems obvious that the conflict in the Ukraine will go on for quite some time, as it will take time for the Russian military to destroy all the Western weapons being sent there. It may be a very cold winter in Europe.

Meanwhile, the Lithuanian government, following the UK and Canada, have banned (‘sanctioned’) the presence of the Russian Patriarch Kyrill on its territory. This follows the policy of the CIA and other Western secret services. In the UK, for example, nobody who works for certain State organisations, like GCHQ, is allowed to be Russian Orthodox, but must belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. In the case of Lithuania the ban on Patriarch Kyrill is being upheld by the local representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. This is very strange because they recently defrocked a small number of clergy who wanted the Lithuanian Church to go under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, including one very senior clergyman. It is not clear what is happening there.

And in Africa the Exarch, Metropolitan Leonid of Klin, stated on 28 July that the number of clergyman in the Russian Exarchate there has doubled since the end of December 2021, when it stood at 102, now standing at over 200 and still growing. He declared that the reason for this growth is that so many wish to avoid falling into the schism of Patriarch Theodore of Alexandria who chose to support the schism in the Ukraine. He added that the Patriarchate of Alexandria had persecuted clergy, put them on trial and tried to throw out clergy, their families and parishioners from their own churches, but the clergy had remained faithful to the canons (we might add, just like in England). He added that ‘the Russian Orthodox Church has come to Africa for ever’.

It must be said that Russia has received backing for its operation in the Ukraine from Africa, as well as from China, Iran, India, the vast majority of countries in Asia and also in Latin America. As Russian commentators have put it: ‘The West has never understood and will never understand that Russia is not a geographical, economic or political phenomenon, but above all a spiritual one, which is why it is impossible to destroy it by physically taking over its capital or even its whole territory, as was done in 1917’…. ‘Almost one thousand years of Western Imperialism are coming to a shameful and self-inflicted death, one way or another’.

Like the rest of the Orthodox world, and indeed the world in general, we await further developments.