Tag Archives: The Future

Our Archbishop Athanasius of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

The Most Reverend Athanasius of Bogdania, Vicar Bishop of the Diocese of Italy, was elected on Friday 25 October to the dignity of the Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The newly elected Archbishop of Great Britain is 42 years old and has been a bishop of the Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church since May 2018.

He was born on 17 January 1982 in Chisinau in the Republic of Moldova, being the first of the two sons of Eugen and Ala Rusnac and also speaks Russian. He has held Romanian citizenship since 12 October 2010.

He was tonsured monk on 8 December 2008 and then was ordained deacon. On 16 April 2009 he became a priest for the chapel of the Diocesan Centre and the Dormition Monastery in Rome. Between 2009 and 2018 he served at the ‘Dormition of the Virgin Mary’ Chapel next to the Diocesan Centre in Rome.

On 15 February 15 2018, he was elected Vicar Bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Italy, with the title of Bogdania , and on 1 May he was consecrated bishop.

Archbishop Athanasius was an engineer. He studied between 2000 and 2005 at INSA Lyon (Institut National des Sciences Appliqués de Lyon – France). He obtained the degree of Engineer with a Master’s degree, his speciality – Telecommunications and Networks. He also followed a specialisation internship in the field of IT (MT Systems – Lyon, France).

Between 2006 and 2010, he attended the ‘Saint-Serge’ Faculty of Orthodox Theology in Paris, as did Fr Andrew Phillips, but that was over 25 years earlier. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in pastoral theology in 2010. Between 2010 and 2012, he attended a Master’s course in Practical Theology (Canon Law), at the Faculty of Theology ‘Andrei Șaguna’ in Sibiu. Master’s thesis – ‘Principles of Canon Theology in the Diaspora, with special reference to Italy’.

The Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as well as the Diocese of Ireland and Iceland, were established on 29 February 2024. The new dioceses are part of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe.

There are over a million Romanians living in Great Britain who currently have 100 parishes, branches and Orthodox missions, as well as three monasteries.

An article from 2020

The life story of the hierarch baptised at the age of eight. From Communism to the Italian diaspora.

The youngest Romanian hierarch, Bishop Atanasie de Bogdania, turned 38 on Friday 17 January 2020. The hierarch gave an interview in which he talks about the story of his life, beyond the already known biography during his almost two years of service as Vicar Bishop of the Diocese of Italy.

Bishop Atanasie de Bogdania was born in Chisinau during the atheist Communist regime and was baptised around the age of eight along with his brother and father. He first became an engineer in Telecommunications and Networks in France, and then a monk in Italy, being a close disciple of Metropolitan Joseph of Western and Southern Europe and of Bishop Silouan of Italy.

His Eminence’s father was a university professor, and his mother worked in a publishing house, things that did not allow them to have visible faith in society. Both the wedding of the parents and the baptism of the children took place after 1990.

‘My father, after Communism fell, with great joy went to the first church he came across, a place of worship that had recently opened because the vast majority of churches had been closed, and asked the priest to marry him. The father, being an experienced minister, asked him: ‘Are you baptised?’, «No!», «But children?», «No children are baptised!».

“In this context, all three of us were baptised: me, my brother, the current deacon Mircea and my father. Shortly after, the parents got married,” recalls the hierarch.

“So, the first encounter with God consciously took place right when I received the Sacrament of Baptism at the age of 8. I remember the gestures that the priest made, the songs from the choir, the emotion of the people who surrounded us, that “How many of you have been baptized in Christ, have also clothed yourselves in Christ”, all of this left a mark on me”.

The Archbishop says that the Most Reverend Metropolitan Joseph and the Most Reverend Bishop Silouan formed him.

“At that time I was young, at 18 I arrived in France and with other colleagues from the INSA Lyon Faculty we went together to monasteries, churches and meetings with young people organised by the parishes. Such great openness, the natural way in which the hierarchs behaved, the way in which they approached people, opened in me this leaning towards Theology”.

This was followed by theological studies and various ministries within the EORI (Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of Italy): Diocesan Secretary, Administrative Counsellor, Exarch of the Monasteries and Diocesan Vicar.

On 15 February 2018, the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church elected him Vicar Bishop of the Diocese of Italy, with the title “of Bogdania”. The consecration took place on 1 May 2018 in Rome.

His Eminence defines his ministry in Italy as a “family” one and relies heavily on the closeness between the clergy and the faithful.

“I try to spend as much time as possible in the territory, that’s why I feel close to the priests, with whom I have a very good relationship. I was godfather to many at their ordination, some I trained with, others I trained and I think we are a real family”.

“This is what I would like in the future: to be a family, together to carry the achievements, but also the hardships. I would like us to be as responsible as we have been until now, that is, to work together for our salvation.”

Although he has been a bishop since 2018, His Eminence has served for ten years in the administration of the Diocese of Italy. “During the ten years of activity, much has been done materially, but the biggest achievement is that our churches are full, people love and seek the Church. That is why our responsibility is very, very big. But in the family everything goes together, both good and bad, to the glory of God”.

 

The Fall of the Western Empire: All Roads Lead to Kazan

According to the American-run Mediazona group, which no-one would ever accuse of being pro-Russian, the number of Russian deaths in the Ukrainian conflict is now nearly 73,000, with perhaps another 100,000 wounded and 6 deserters. This compares with 848,000 Ukrainian deaths and seriously wounded, with perhaps 1,000,000 less seriously wounded and over 80,000 deserters, let alone the millions who have run away abroad to avoid being press-ganged into the suicidal military who are dying in vain for the USA.

Ex-President Zelensky is now so desperate and delusional that he is blackmailing and bluffing NATO with the threat of using nuclear weapons. This threat is if NATO does not allow the Ukraine to join it and so if NATO countries are not obliged to participate in the US proxy war directly. This is an empty threat, because he does not have any nuclear weapons and cannot obtain them. And a NATO proxy war is by definition one in which NATO does not lose any troops.

As for the Western Empire with its plutocrat oligarchy, it is desperately trying to hold on in the Ukraine and the Middle East until the inauguration of the new US President in January 2025. They know that the war is lost. Even if they throw a few more billion dollars at the Ukraine, it will make no difference, as dollar bills do not win wars. Already a trillion dollars, which is what this futile conflict has so far cost the USA and Western Europe in subsidies and suicidal sanctions, has made no difference except to postpone the inevitable defeat of Kiev.

Only arms, munitions and soldiers make a difference. And there are very few of those left in the Ukraine, especially after the disastrous invasion of Russia’s historic Kursk province. This has already cost nearly 26,000 Ukrainian dead and seriously wounded and nearly 1,000 tanks, vehicles and artillery pieces. As for the NATO warehouses, they are almost empty, and NATO countries are unable in their very deindustrialised state to make arms and munitions. The casino player has little more to bet; the hand is lost. How can he leave the gaming table without losing face?

As for the Ukrainian regime, it is clearly a Fascist state which steals hundreds of churches from the faithful and allows its armed gangsters to lock them up so no-one can go in. No-one will go in. Whereas Russia has a military strategy, Kiev has only a PR strategy, Psyops, devised by US and UK PR companies which give out their lies to be parroted by the Western media. (As for Israel, it is bankrupt, its economy is in tatters and hundreds of thousands of Israelis are fleeing, especially to Cyprus, Greece and the USA. Who wants to live in Israel now?).

In fact, the plutocrat oligarchs are now facing their nightmare of a threefold defeat in the headlines: Russian troops greeted victoriously by masses of people lining the roads, as they liberate the Russian port of Odessa and Transdnistria and vigorous support shown for Russia all over north-east and south-east Europe, not only in Hungary and Slovakia; the Russian victory comes in establishing a New Ukraine in the north and west of the present Ukraine on the model of Belarus and with an independent Church; Iran shoots down over 50 Israeli warplanes and destroys Israeli bases and concentrations of armour and troops with its unstoppable hypersonic missiles; Chinese troops land in Taiwan and greeted as liberators by virtually all the (Chinese) people who live there and support for China shown throughout the Asia-Pacific.

The reality is that the US has $36 trillion of unpayable debt. This is more even than its official GDP, which in reality is far lower than that declared.  It has wasted $8 trillion on its forever wars which it has lost since 2003. It also has to finance some 750 military bases in 80 countries, not to mention CIA offices all over the world. Only US arms merchants and politicians benefit. The US can no longer afford to keep its colonies among the Global Majority, and will be obliged to abandon Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, just as it has had to abandon the Ukraine. It will have to evacuate Western Europe, which will finally have to sort itself out, dividing into four regions, the 21 countries of the north-west and south-west, and the many others in the north-east and south-east, close to Russia, which in this way become ready to join BRICS. The US will be left, at best, to concentrate on its crippled self.

Nine hundred years of Western colonisation, 450 years of colonial expansion to the peripheries of Europe, 450 years of colonial expansion outside Europe, and since 1945 decolonisation, first political and now at last real, that is, economic and geopolitical, have led to the present situation. The Western world is collapsing because it is harvest-time and the devil is dancing around it. The BRICS Summit in Kazan is not the beginning of the end of the Western Empire, but the ending of the end of that Empire.

 

 

 

A New Publication: The Benckendorff Papers

The interviews taken with a Russian Countess and a Russian Count and posted on this site on 22 June and 31 July 2024 have now been published and illustrated in an A5 booklet of 43 pages under the above title. The booklet is available from frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. The cost is £2 in Great Britain and $5 elsewhere. The easiest way to pay is by Paypal, using the above e-mail.

Archdiocesan Assembly of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Northern Ireland

On the afternoon of 13 October all four clergy from Colchester and two lay delegates went to our new St George’s Cathedral in Enfield. Here we were met by nearly 200 delegates from the Romanian and Moldovan parishes in England and Wales and the seven bishops who form the Synod of the Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe. There are 870 parishes and many monasteries and convents in the Metropolia. Twenty years ago there was only one bishop and thirty parishes. Today there are sixty parishes in Rome and ten parishes in London alone. Of the seven bishops at present, there are three bishops in France (one of them is French), two in Italy and two in Spain and Portugal.

Altogether nearly four million people who belong to the Metropolia, as the Romanian and Moldovan Diaspora is over four times larger than all the other Orthodox put together. The number of Orthodox in the Romanian Archdiocese in England is now over 1.2 million, including the children born here. Vladyka Joseph said that there are 24 qualified candidates to be ordained in Great Britain, where there are already 100 parishes and in years to come there will be hundreds more.

Vladyka spoke of the need to unite others into the Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of all nationalities. The main aim of the meeting was to announce the two candidates to be Archbishop here next year. The two announced were Bishop Theophil and Bishop Athanasy. The latter is Moldovan and is Russian-speaking.

Our Future after the Defeat of Millennial Nazism in the Ukraine

 Introduction

The geographical fault-line between what is Western Secularist (former Catholic-Protestant) and Orthodox Christian Civilisations runs through the Austro-Polish Hapsburg far west of the Ukraine. This is precisely the origin of the present war there, for the same reason as the war in ex-Yugoslavia took place a generation ago because of the existence there of that same civilisational fault-line, only to the south-west of the Ukraine. The Secularist desire has been to conquer the Ukraine (and then ex-Yugoslavia) in order to exploit its natural resources and riches. One Imperialistic Civilisation, the Western Secularist, is trying to take over the other, the Christian. However, we are resisting and the Christian will be victorious, for: ‘We are based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion’. What is the situation in the Ukraine now, after what will soon be 1,000 days of tragic conflict?

In the Ukraine Now

Last Sunday I asked one of my parishioners where her husband, who is a builder, was. She explained that, together with hundreds of other Russian-speaking builders who live all over Western Europe, he is in the Ukraine, six weeks on, six weeks off. There, just outside Kiev, he is helping to build a palace for the well-known Rinat Akhmetov, the richest oligarch in the Ukraine. She showed me a photograph of the palace under construction. It is indeed a huge Disney-like, oriental palace, of the sort that has not been built in this country for 200 years. She told me that it is being built with the finest materials, marble and gold, from all over the world. Here is the reality of the bankrupted Ukraine today, where tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are dying every month on behalf of such oligarchs, who have been fattened on billions of our dollars, euros and pounds, though our own infrastructure is collapsing.

Two and a half years ago Western leaders used to repeat the same hypnotising mantra: ‘We will support the Ukraine for as long as it takes.’ What did that mean? As long as what takes? For as long as it takes the Democrats to win (or lose?) the US elections in November 2024? Now they declare: ‘We will support the Ukraine for as long as we can’. But what does that mean? ‘For as long as we want?’. For today virtually everyone, even in the pro-Kiev Western media, has dropped the propaganda line and knows that the West has lost its proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia, wasting a million young lives and $250 billion. That is why few in the West now speak of it. That conflict used brainwashed Nazi or press-ganged Ukrainians to die on behalf of the USA, in order to attack and destroy Russia, without a single American dying. ‘The best investment ever’, according to Graham, a particularly Fascistic US Congressman.

The fact is that the Russian Federation has had to demilitarise and denazify not just the Ukraine, as it had originally and clearly announced as its aims on 24 February 2022 together with the third aim of the liberation of the Donbass, but also NATO. (By the way, NATO was established thanks to Nazi Germans like Reinhard Gehlen after 1945). The demilitarisation and denazification of NATO was never the ambition of the Russians; it was the fault of NATO, which gave all its political, financial and material support to prop up Kiev instead of supporting peace talks. Otherwise, the Ukraine would long ago have capitulated to Russia. The task of demilitarising NATO is why the conflict in the Ukraine has taken so long. The task of denazifying the Ukraine, which many thought impossible, has happened as a result of the deaths, or rather suicides, of whole Nazi regiments of the Kiev Army and of the emigration of others.

There will soon be no Nazis left in the Ukraine, or whatever will replace the Ukraine after the defeat of the Kiev regime and the rout of US/NATO. This was the inevitable result of the Western refusal to negotiate with the Russian Federation for eight years. Now even more NATO countries like Croatia and Slovenia have joined Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Turkey in rejecting the US/NATO war in the Ukraine (let alone in allowing the fantasy of letting the Ukraine join NATO). Italy, Germany and even disillusioned Poland fundamentally agree with them, and France, changeable as ever, has spoken of possible talks. Even the Pentagon in Washington now refuses to give any more support to Kiev, as US military stockpiles are so severely depleted. There remain only the puny military forces of the Russophobic UK, and the seven Nordic and minute and dying Baltic States which still support Kiev, at least in rhetoric.

Zelensky cannot talk, since the West forced Kiev to pass a law to forbid them in April 2022. For the Ukrainian surrender to take place so that there can be peace, Zelensky the US actor-stooge must be removed together with the whole Neo-Nazi cast of the show in Kiev. Perhaps they will murder one another in a violent coup in Kiev, or else they will run away to join the Ukrainian mafia in the USA. In any case, they will remove themselves. The time for peace talks and ceasefires is long over. Some suggest that Kiev can survive under NATO, if it cedes some land to Russia. But Russia, by far the biggest country in the world, does not want any land, it wants security. They could have taken place at any point between early 2014 and early 2022. They did not, because Kiev and, above all, its Western sponsors refused. The Ukraine, as it was, has no future. It will have to capitulate on Russian terms. The West forbade it to have a future.

BRICS

Ever since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and even before that, under worldwide Western Imperialism, the Planet has faced the possibility, one day, of a One World Dictatorship. Since 1991 this potential has become closer. The identity of a possible World Dictator seems to have been a future President of the USA, governing the world through ambassadors and vassals. After the US occupation of the Ukraine in 2014 and then the challenge to its hegemony by the Russian Federation, the possibility of such a One World Dictatorship has rapidly receded. This is because of the BRICS organisation, which recognises several centres of power. Founded 15 years ago on 16 June 2009 in Ekaterinburg, the city of the martyrdom of the last Russian Tsar, BRICS, now with nine members, already has a larger economy than the G7. The Non-Western world is now interested in BRICS, which is to meet in Kazan in a few days’ time.

Indeed, over 150 countries now either want to join BRICS or else have expressed a desire to join it. It is clear that the multicontinental BRICS Alliance, initially Brazil, Russia, India, China and then South Africa, now with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE, is going to replace the UN. The latter is in the US and is effectively controlled by three Western countries of the UN Security Council, the US, the UK and France. They can ignore and block any of its resolutions, like those regarding the illegal sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, Iran, China, Cuba etc, or against Israeli genocide. The teeming billions of Africa, Latin America and India have no real representation at the UN. BRICS is destined to set up a new Assembly or Parliament for the Global Majority. It is also pursuing the gradual process of dedollarisation of the world economy and will replace US-controlled organisations like the World Bank and the IMF. The future beckons.

The impetus for BRICS and its dedollarisation has been created by the US weaponisation of the dollar against the Russian Federation and other countries and the stealing of their assets and gold. Thus, trust has been broken in the SWIFT international payments system. It is not that BRICS is a bloc, it is not, it is a multilateral, multipolar, multicontinental, multicivilisational organisation. As a result, the Western world, which is also bankrupt, that is, the USA and its Anglosphere vassals like the UK, Canada and Australia, the divided Peninsular Western European EU, and other US coastal and island colonies and vassals like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the settler state of Israel, have been isolated – or rather have isolated themselves. BRICS means the disappearance of the hegemony of the USA and all its vassal organisations, not just the World Bank and the IMF, but the G7, the EU, WHO, UNESCO etc.

We can see this Western self-isolation and irrelevance in the fact that the Russian Federation, by far the largest country in Europe by population and area, is now the largest economy in Europe and growing rapidly, and yet Western European countries have cut themselves off from it and are declining. Why cut yourselves off from natural resources like oil, gas, fertiliser, minerals? Countries like Turkiye and all South-Eastern Europe, from Austria to Greece, from Serbia to Hungary, from Romania to Slovakia, from Bulgaria to Cyprus, from Czechia to Croatia, have realised that they are missing the boat. They will peel off from EU tyranny and join BRICS too. They may be joined by countries in South-Western Europe, from Spain to Italy, and eventually France, Benelux and Germany. Only English-speaking North-Western Europe will remain in the US orbit, but only until their US-appointed elites have been overthrown.

BRICS means the end of the domination of the Atlantic Powers, which has lasted for 500 years. The Pacific and Indian Powers have risen and are taking their place. The former Western colonies or countries that adopted one or other of the bipolar Western ideologies of Capitalism or Communism, from Eurasian Russia to Africa, from Asia to Latin America, are freeing themselves from Western geopolitical and financial colonialisation. BRICS countries work on behalf of their peoples, who believe in sovereignty and patriotism, but do not believe in the tyranny of transnational corporations, banks and Globalism. Centralisation, whether Capitalist or Communist, is dead. It is time in all spheres to move away from top-down centralised control and to delegate to the grassroots. It is time for the dinosaurs to remove themselves from the world stage, or else be removed by the ever-accelerating course of history.

The Sinking Millennial Titanic

Some observers say that the present rout of the West in the Ukraine, which the West tried to expand to and absorb by its habitual organised violence after February 2014, is a turning point. They say that it marks the end of 500 years of Western domination of the world and overseas expansion, expressed by the word ‘Globalism’. This began with Western voyages of conquest and settlement across the Atlantic to the Americas, Africa and Asia some 500 years ago. They are wrong. The Western world and its unique ideology of supremacy and infallibility began not 500 years ago, but 1,000 years ago. It can even be dated precisely – to 14 February 1014. Then, in Rome, the new foundational Creed of the West was consciously promulgated – previously it had only been proclaimed by illiterate provincial barbarians, who did not even understand what they were saying. From then on, the West moved south and east.

This new Creed, first proclaimed in Rome at the Coronation of the German King Henry II as the ‘Holy Roman’ Emperor (he was not Holy or Roman), claimed that the Holy Spirit, the Source of all authority and unity, proceeds from the leader of the West. Then the leader of the West was the Pope of Rome – even though the formal dogma of his infallibility was not proclaimed and formulated until 856 years later, in 1870. However, his supremacy was already clear in, for example, the Dictatus Papae of Pope Gregory VII in 1075, though nearly all of these principles had been repeated for decades. Today this supremacy and infallibility have been passed down to and inherited one after the other by the leaders of other Western countries. Now it belongs to the President of the USA. The claim to worldwide supremacy and infallibility has been the essential belief of the post-Christian, post-1014, post-Schism West.

The consequences of the 14 February 1014 Declaration of Papal, that is, Western, supremacy and infallibility can already be seen in the 1030s with the Papally-sponsored invasions of Spain and then Sicily. In 1066 it came again with the Papally-sponsored invasion and genocide of England, again using its Norman shock troops, and then to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, where the same genocide was repeated. But it is also clear in the German/Frankish/Western ‘Crusades’ in the Holy Land, in internal inquisitions and crusades (against the Cathars) in Western Europe, and in those of the Teutonic Knights in Eastern Europe. The essence of this ethnic Western ideology was what we today call Nazism. And it is precisely ethnic Western. For example, when the Soviet Union invaded Bulgaria in 1944, ordinary Bulgarians greeted the Soviet forces enthusiastically, for only the Germanic elite in Bulgaria was Nazi.

The fact is that Orthodox Church culture, even of lapsed Orthodox Russians and Bulgarians in 1944, is anti-Nazi. For example, let us take the case of the Non-Orthodox British historian, David Irving, who defends Nazi Germany. For him anti-Nazism is hypocrisy, given that Allied leaders also participated in Hitlerite crimes and racism in that conflict. True, Hitler hated the Jews and the West loved them, but only because the Western Allies were funded by Jewish financiers. However, just like Hitler, the Western leaders also hated ’subhuman’ Russians, Africans, Arabs and Asians. Irving should have been consistent and angry at all Nazism, not just British, French and American, but the German too. So the foolish Irving attacks Allied Nazism, not seeing that anyone can be a Nazi. For example, a bankrupt Israeli, Netanyahu, real name Mileikowsky, is also a genocidal Nazi, and as such is opposed by heroic Non-Zionist and anti-Nazi Jews.

Nothing can save the West from its sinking Titanic in Kiev. True, it can try and blame the senile Biden, but shifting the blame is not a solution. In reality, the West is not afraid that Russia will win against it in its proxy war, but rather it is afraid that the truth will win. This fear of the truth has now become the main concern. This fear of the truth is also why most Western people will not join the Orthodox Church – because they refuse to repent. As Western people claim: ‘I cannot join the Orthodox Church because of my culture’. They reject Christ because of their proudly unrepentant, Secularist culture. All they have to do is to refer back to their countries of birth before the millennial aberration and deviation of 1014. For example, I am English by blood, have a British passport, but I am not British, not even English. I am Old English and belong to Old England, to Orthodoxy, to Christ, not to Secularist pride.

The Future of Western Europe, Russia and the Orthodox Church

Thus, White Supremacism, Racism, Aryanism, Fascism, Nazism, Zionism, whatever you wish to call it, is deeply Western, as it justifies imperialism, colonialism and the exploitation of the whole Non-Western world. Ultimately, it goes back to the supremacy and infallibility of medieval Papism. This ideology is not of the Church. That is why certain Russians of the émigré Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) group, Romanians of the Iron Guard, and other Fascists, even though somewhat culturally Orthodox, were always tiny fringe groups, outside the mainstream, outside communion with the Church, outside Christianity. Let us recall that Christianity was born in Asia, not in the aberration of a Europe, cut off from the rest of Asia and, above all, from the Church of God. The tired old Western ideologies of Papism and Protestantism are dying. However, their substitution by Secularism is even worse, indeed, it is lethal.

Here we can speak of the Sovietisation of the West over the last 35 years of President Bush’s ‘New World Order’, already the Old World Order. Sovietisation can be seen in the Western elite/nomenklatura which governs by Uniparty and censorship (‘cancelling’) of ‘dissident’ views. Such ‘heretics’ commit ‘hate speech’ and so are persecuted. The elite has learned nothing from the fall of the USSR. Sovietisation is lethal, for it is based on death, hatred for God, persecution of the Church and its words of life, through abortion, euthanasia (‘good death’) and inevitable depopulation, as women are told to be men and men are told to be homosexuals. That is the new norm. On the other hand, Russia is returning to its roots. It is no longer Western, neither Imperial as it was from 1721-1917 with its serfdom, nor Soviet as it was from 1917 to 1991 with its Gulag, nor Oligarchic as it was from 1991 to 2016 with its Wild East Capitalism.

The 300 years or twelve generations of the three Western experiments in Russia failed, and disastrously so, and have now led Russia to begin the return to its roots. It is all that remains. These are precisely the roots to which the last Tsar, Nicholas II, wanted to return to, in governance, in social and foreign policy, in architecture, in Church painting and singing. The Tsar, who founded the Hague Peace Conventions, would have greatly approved of BRICS, of international co-operation and harmony. He was the forerunner to it. The future Ukraine will share in such co-operation. After the tragic conflict which the USA has created there, the New Ukraine will be renewed and its third world infrastructure will be brought to world class standards by BRICS, its corrupt Western oligarchs chased out by a State that protects its people, as has been happening so spectacularly in Russia over the last twenty-five years.

The transformation of the Russian Lands, the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus, will mean transformation within the Orthodox Church, 75% of whose faithful live in those Lands. True, several parts of the Orthodox Church are for now under the control of elderly individuals, who are stuck in the past. Such is the situation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul, where individuals still dream of an Empire which collapsed nearly 600 years ago. In Moscow too, there are individuals who also dream of an Imperial future, patterned by rigid ritualism, ultra-nationalism and propose a militarised and uniformised ‘Church-Army’. And as a result, there are individuals in the Russian Church, who call themselves ‘princes of the Church’, who dream of imperialist power and effeminate riches, ironically sometimes sponsored by the CIA, and who undertake schism, jealousy and hatred, persecuting pastors and people alike.

The reality is quite different from those delusions of empire, for the Church does not belong to ‘princes of the Church’, but to the faithful people. For example, the population of Non-Orthodox Western Europe, inclusive of and westwards of Finland, Germany, Austria and Italy, is approximately 431 million. Almost exactly 1% of that population are Romanian Orthodox (other Orthodox, Greeks, Russians, Serbs etc, number at most only 0.2% of that 431 million). Certain elderly Greeks and Russians may dream of building ecclesiastical empires in Western Europe, but they are irrelevant to 4.3 million Non-Greeks and Non-Russians. Such too is the situation elsewhere outside Russia and Greece, in lands where Orthodox have emigrated and live. The future of the Church in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States, Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania is with the majority who live there, not with imperialistic dreamers in distant cities.

Conclusion

A fresh wind is blowing from the east and it is sweeping away the corrupted old world, the cobwebbed, antiquated and dying structures formed out of the last millennium and the domination of the planet by the anti-Christian Western world and its ideologies, whether Capitalist or Communist. The old ‘Papism’, centralised control from one centre, is dead. The unipolar and unilateral is rapidly being replaced by the multilateral and multipolar. Western Europeans, wake up! You have been fooled and betrayed for a thousand years! They have substituted the truth with a fake! Return to your spiritual roots and identity! Ignore the pathologically sick, who reject their own identity, and tell you that you are beyond salvation without their rebaptism, and come to the Church of God. Here you are welcome. Yes, indeed, our values are: ‘humanity, mercy and compassion’.  The old is going. The new is here. Welcome!

 

 

 

 

 

Twelve Revelations from the Conflict in the Ukraine

 

The US-orchestrated conflict in the Ukraine began in February 2014 after the US tried to expand there in order to set up bases along the Russian border. After continual provocations by the US-installed Kiev puppet regime, its murder of 14,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilians and its NATO-backed persecution of the Orthodox Church, the conflict intensified in February 2022. Since then, there have been twelve revelations in all: about the Kiev regime, the Free Ukraine which is now taking shape, the Russian Federation and the Western elite, which has been standing behind Kiev, using it as its proxy to try and destroy the Russian Federation and exploit its resources. The four groups of three revelations for each are:

The Kiev Regime

 

  1. It has become clear that the Kiev regime wants to blackmail the US, that is, all of NATO, into directly involvement on the ground in the Ukraine, as this is the only hope it has of possibly defeating the Russian Federation. Alone it can do nothing, it does not have the willing or trained manpower, let alone the necessary arms and munitions – which highly deindustrialised NATO countries cannot provide Kiev with anyway. (Similarly, through its constant provocations, Israel wants the US to get directly involved on the ground in its war against Iran in the Lebanon and its genocide in Gaza. Alone it too can do nothing). If the US does get involved directly in either case (most NATO countries will categorically refuse to do so), World War III could begin. At least for Kiev, it appears that the end is nigh, after it was seemingly abandoned by the Pentagon in Washington. In Israel nothing is yet clear.

 

  1. The US policy in the face of yet another lost war is not the same as the Kiev regime policy. The US policy is to hold on in the Ukraine only until the US elections in fewer than 40 days’ time or, at most, until the inauguration of the new President in fewer than 100 days’ time. After that, the whole policy can be dropped, as its abject failure can then be blamed on Biden, who by then will no longer be in power, not even officially, if, that is, he is still alive.

 

  1. Under the atheist Jewish Presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky, the Kiev regime set up a fake Church, which it tried to substitute for the real one. Although the CIA bribed part of the Greek Church to give this wild scheme some credibility, it has no serious believers in it and is headed by nationalist gangsters with defrocked corrupt and homosexual ex-clergy. How could it be taken seriously, when it was formed by violent thugs and hooligans? These beat up real Orthodox clergy and people in order to steal 1,500 emptied church buildings from the real Church under Metropolitan Onufry, whom the whole free Orthodox world backs. Typically, one of the first acts of the fake Church was to go over to the Protestant calendar, as favoured by its creators, the CIA!

 

The Free Ukraine

 

  1. The virulently anti-Russian, BBC-sponsored Mediazona group reckons ‘Russian’ casualties in the conflict at between 70,000 – 120,000 killed and wounded (against over 800,000 for the Ukrainian military). However, Medizona fails to explain that most ‘Russian’ casualties are Ukrainians from the east of the Ukraine, millions of whom have fled to Russia over the last ten years, seeking freedom and safety from genocide. These free Ukrainians form the backbone of the ‘Russian’ infantry who, as they see it, are today liberating the Ukraine from the Kiev regime and Neo-Nazi groups. The conflict in the Ukraine is a civil war and everybody there knows it.

 

  1. The Ukraine is also being freed by an anti-Nazi Ukrainian resistance network. These are local Ukrainians outraged by the genocide carried out by the CIA-imposed Kiev regime and its dreaded SBU secret police. Their network provides intelligence to the Russian-led forces, so that they can destroy NATO equipment and munitions, eliminate foreign mercenaries and carry out sabotage on Kiev regime infrastructure, especially electricity generation and the railways.

 

  1. There will be no ceasefire, ‘stalemate’, ‘frozen conflict’ or ‘Korean solution’ in the Ukraine. Russia is advancing, so it will not open any peace talks, even if Kiev wanted them, which it cannot, as the Western elite long ago forced Kiev to make peace talks with Russia illegal. There will only be capitulation, unconditional surrender, on Russia’s terms. This means Russia retaining at the very least the five Russian provinces which it has more or less occupied or liberated already, and possibly the next four historically (until 1922) Russian provinces. The rest will be demilitarised, de-NATOised and neutralised. There will be self-determination for the Non-NATO rest, the Free Ukraine, with freedom for the Church and human rights for all its citizens of all nationalities guaranteed.

 

The Russian Federation

 

  1. Thanks in part to the fabulously backfiring Western sanctions, the economy of the Russian Federation is now the fourth largest in the world, even according to the very low PPP measurement, after only China, the USA and India. However, it is clear that the economy of the Russian Federation, which has a population only one tenth of India’s, is now catching up with the economies of both India and the USA. The size of the latter’s economy is much exaggerated, as it is measured by the non-productive criteria of finance, insurance, real estate and crime, and not by manufacturing. And yet in 2022 the Western media told everyone that the Russian economy was no bigger than Spain’s! In any case, the Russian economy has overtaken both Japan’s and Germany’s, which are in freefall, leaving France’s and Britain’s in ninth and tenth places in the world and Spain’s somewhere further down the list. The Russian economy is now the largest in Western Eurasia and there will come a time when it will become the third largest in the world.

 

  1. The development of the Russian-founded BRICS has been greatly accelerated by the illegal anti-Russian sanctions, such as the refusal to allow Russia to use payments by SWIFT, imposed by US and European aggressiveness and narcissistic jealousy. Western aggression has thrown the Russian Federation, China, Iran and others in the Global Majority together in the warmest of embraces. Seeing these sanctions, the rest of the world is now turning its back on US and Western European bullies, whom it too can no longer trust. This is the boomerang effect of sanctions, which has led to the accelerating decline of the one billion of the West and the accelerating rise of the seven billion of the Rest. Western sanctions have boosted BRICS perhaps by up to ten years in just two years. The collapse of the dollar is no longer a myth, but a dangerously close real possibility, as too is the possibility of BRICS becoming the new UN.

 

  1. After many generations of both State-imposed and now self-imposed imperialisation, ritualisation, bureaucratisation, militarisation and secularisation, the administrative bureaucracy of the Russian Orthodox Church has lost its spiritual independence and has compromised itself. To its shame, it is refusing to support persecuted confessors for Orthodoxy and so is no longer taken seriously. However, freedom is in the air and more new Local Orthodox Churches will yet be formed out of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has unworthily clung on to centralised, imperialist, Soviet-style power for far too long. And this is despite the Russian State’s abandonment of centralised, imperialist, Soviet-style power over thirty years ago. Indeed, the Russian Church administration may need the help of the Russian State to get the Russian Church to catch up, returning it to its true heritage, of St Sergius, St Seraphim, St Matrona, St John of Shanghai and all the other New Martyrs and Confessors, who confess the freedom of the Holy Spirit.

 

The Western Elite

 

  1. Over the last 30 years the Western European ruling class has lost its spiritual independence and, compromising itself, has been vassalised. Whereas thirty years ago, indeed even twenty years ago, the Western European governing class showed independence in thought and action, today it has surrendered itself to the Globalist US elite, to which it essentially belongs. However, although their elite is now US-run, European Sovereigntist patriotic peoples, regardless of left or right politics, are today beginning to overthrowing in elections these Globalist Brussels-Washington leaders. Many of these leaders who cling on to power despite the election results are also perverts. The peoples are asserting their independence from them. This is clear in the very weak and unpopular government in Germany, in France, which has had no government for three months and where rule is through a president-dictator who refuses to accept the results of elections, and in the UK, which is now on its hated fifth Prime Minister in five years and may soon be on its sixth. Hungary, Slovakia and now Austria have already overthrown their elites and in Italy, the UK and the Netherlands, the people are trying. Outside Europe, Japan is following the same pattern.

 

  1. The media of the Western world, often also led by perverts, have given up freedom and free speech in favour of censorship. This is because its media, like its elite, are US-controlled, called under ‘editorial control’. Their new word for lies or propaganda is ‘narratives’. Narratives come from living in a virtual world, from delusions and wishful thinking, PR, psyops and spin.

 

  1. The source of these delusional narratives is the narcissism of the Western elite. Narcissism always blinds to reality, as narcissists prefer to live in delusions. We can see this in US Foreign Policy, just as we can see it in US bishops. When narcissists do not get their way, as they have no empathy anyway and despise those who do, they lose their temper and often turn to drink and try to destroy families, as we have also seen, screaming, ‘Give me the keys to the church’, down the telephone.

The Collapse of Unions

Ex-President Zelensky (his term ended last May) is now in the USA, proposing a ‘Victory Plan’. In fact, as the bankrupt Ukraine is being defeated, if not routed, this is a Plan for World War III. This is because it demands that the Ukraine join NATO, meaning that NATO troops would then die fighting nuclear-armed Russia in the Ukraine. Well over half the already bankrupt countries in NATO are totally against this. In any case, NATO has very few weapons and munitions left in terms of tanks, artillery, drones and shells, it has and prints only inflationary dollar bills. The fact is that there is no ‘Victory Plan’, except in the deluded fantasies of CIA-controlled US and UK PR advisors, whose scripts are read by the handpicked actor Zelensky.

With 800,000 Ukrainian dead and wounded, 400,000 of them since 1 January 2024, (and 70,000 Russian dead) so far, it is long since time for the conflict in the Ukraine to end. Those who want it to continue want to continue Slav fratricide. It will not end in stalemate or a frozen conflict, it can only end in the capitulation of Kiev through the overthrow of the Neo-Nazi puppet regime in Kiev by those many Ukrainians, who hate it and resist it. Nobody wants to fight for them any more, for they are not following a Ukrainian agenda, but an American agenda. There will follow the formation of a New Ukraine inside realistic and natural borders. And it will be NATO and EU free, for neither NATO, nor the EU has any future anyway.

The tragic events in the Ukraine, like the waves of Israeli terrorism against Palestine and the Lebanon, blinding and maiming civilians through exploding electronic devices, are ushering in a New World Order. This New Order is the result of the 1991 collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union and now the collapse and dissolution of the American Union, which is 33 years overdue. The American Union means not just the USA (a corporate Union formed after a bloody, four-year long civil war in the USA), but all its associated, largely US-run organisations, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the G7, the OECD, NATO, the EU, the Anglosphere, AUKUS, the Five Eyes, the Olympic Games, the ICC, the ICJ, the Nobel Prizes etc.

The time of Unions is over. The Soviet Union, formed as a result of the First World War, and the American Union, formed as a result of the Second World War, are finished. The Soviet Union is being replaced by a Confederation of the three East Slav peoples, Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian, returning to the pre-Imperial Russia (which was also Unionist) of over 300 years ago. However, the American Union has not yet been replaced. Its dissolution, concerning the whole Western world which is vassal to it, is far more dramatic, for it is based on a Western Union which is a millennium old. Its ideology of Globalism, that is, US-controlled Domination, is to be replaced by the mutually beneficial co-operation of Sovereign Nations.

The BRICS Alliance and the Holy Trinity

‘Between Holy Trinity and hell there is a deep abyss’

‘The Orthodox Church’ by Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov

Western leaders have for years been weaponising the adolescent hatred for Russia that is widespread in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, and other Eastern European countries. It is adolescent because ever since achieving independence between 1989 and 1991 after over four long decades of Soviet captivity, these countries have behaved like disruptive teenagers and have still not grown up even after 35 years. They are opposed to those who for them still represent their oppressive Soviet parents, but in fact are not, for Soviet Imperialism is, like the Soviet Union, long since dead. The present conflict in the Ukraine is the most tragic example of this adolescent revolt.

Interestingly, Western leaders have failed to achieve this weaponisation in Georgia. This is because since its failed attack on Russian-protected territory at US bidding in 2008, Georgia has grown up and is no more a teenager. It has understood that the Russian Federation is not a Soviet organisation, but a different country. In the Russian Federation only a few old people and obscurantists nostalgic for Stalin hanker after the Soviet period. Georgians want to apologise for their 2008 war and understand that today’s Russian Federation does not want an Empire again. The USSR died in 1991 and the Russian Federation has seen the negative results of past imperialism.

In this, Russia is unlike the Western Establishment, which continues to want to impose its imperialist rule, either by organised military violence or else by economic stealth on the rest of the world. This is because the ‘Western Union’ did not die in 1991. Indeed, it proclaims that since ‘the West is Best’, therefore ‘the Rest’ must submit themselves to the Western Establishment. The reality is that it has psychologically projected its own aggressive imperialism onto the Russian Federation, treating it as the Soviet Union, and so accusing it of being aggressive! This is their narrative. In fact, when talking of Russian aggression, it is talking about itself. This is psychological projection.

The Western Establishment is stuck in the past, in 1991. What has replaced the rejected Soviet Imperialism of the past and, potentially, what will replace the still unrejected Western imperialism of the present? Since imperialism does not work, the answer is some kind of mutual benefit organisation. And today this is represented by the BRICS Alliance, which is the coming together of various countries and civilisations: Orthodox Christian (Russia), Buddhist-Confucian (China), Hindu (India), Muslim (Iran and the UAE), South American Catholic (Brazil), African (South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia), but dominated by none, quite unlike the US-controlled UN in New York.

The BRICS Alliance has yet to be permanently headquartered in a centre (in Kazan, or in Ekaterinburg or elsewhere in Eurasia?) and have its own Parliament, infrastructure, secretariat and spokesmen. This will come, as mutual economic benefits become ever clearer. With time these economic benefits can become more and more social and diplomatic and create friendships between different peoples. Unlike the G7, membership of BRICS is not restricted to the USA and its political vassals. The BRICS New Development Bank is called on to replace US-run organisations like the World Bank and the IMF. BRICS members are not at all obliged to sign up to the LGBT ideology.

Thus, this Alliance of Sovereign Nations could become a genuine and literal ‘United Nations’, independent of US control and its Security Council, dominated by the elites of three Western nations, representing fewer than 7% of the world. Structurally, we see that BRICS has the Trinitarian concept of Unity in Diversity. Yet, it is a multipolar organism, not a one-size-fits-all unipolar organisation, imposed from above by one power on all others. It is this Unity in Diversity, typical of a Confederation or Family of Nations which is at the heart of the BRICS Alliance, and not the abyss of a Unitarian, Unionist and unipolar imposition such as: ‘Agree with us or else we will sanction you’. BRICS is the future and its sixteenth summit will be taking place in Kazan in exactly a month’s time.

 

 

The Russian-Founded New World Order and Moving to Russia

Introduction: Why I Have Not Moved to Russia

As a fluent Russian-speaker, I wanted to move to Russia when I was actually 20, when I was invited to study at the Moscow Theological Academy in 1977, but the Cold War prevented that. I would long ago have moved there, if I were 20 years old. In the last twelve months I have been invited to move there, where the futile slanders of me by one here are mocked, to serve as a priest by two Patriarchal bishops, whom I know and who know the real situation.

However, my family lives here and my Russian and other parishioners need me here. I will not be going to Russia, unless my whole family, all 27 of us, wishes to go. I prefer to stay and continue the fight against the ecumenists, against the covidists, and against the pseudo-Russian schismatics. I was, by God’s will, born here. God put me here to do something here. When I was 18 and the late Metropolitan Kallistos told me that, I did not know what that something was.

Gradually, the twofold sense of my life was revealed to me. It was to witness to Western European Orthodoxy, to St Felix, St Edmund and the ten thousand other Western Saints, whom St John also venerated, and so to restore the Non-Establishment West, and, secondly, in the words of the ever-memorable Slovak Metropolitan Laurus, ‘to keep the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. This meant to act against the rogues of left and right, against both the scribes and against the pharisees.

This meant fighting against both the spiritually empty intellectuals, ecumenists and modernists, and the equally spiritually empty ‘princes of the Church’, whose only interests are their preening narcissism and love of power and money. Both sides, acting together against the mainstream, that is, against the mighty river, of the Church of God, are too cowardly and unprincipled to stand up to such corrupt bullies, anti-family perverts and psychopaths, and they repeat their slanders against us. But we are not cowards and unprincipled. God is the Judge of those who repeat slanders against us.

Russian Military, Political and Diplomatic Victories

In the wide world, today the government of President Putin is liberating the bankrupt Ukraine and its patriotic and persecuted faithful from NATO Nazism, as promoted by the local Fascist rogues in Kiev. Clearly, this conflict will end with the Kiev regime’s capitulation. Russia hopes that this capitulation will take place through a popular Ukrainian insurrection against the Kiev regime. That is possible. The US-created Ukraine is the biggest loser of this war, but not far behind it is the now isolated and impoverished Western Europe. This has lost greatly, as it has committed economic suicide by boycotting cheap Russian gas, oil, fertiliser and other resources and has also taken in eight million very expensive Ukrainians, who became very unpopular there through their demands and sense of entitlement. As for the third loser, the ungoverned USA, it has already abandoned the Ukraine, just as it abandoned Afghanistan and Iraq before it.

Internationally, the same Russian government has created a defensive Alliance with China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Mongolia. Thus, Russia’s borders, east and west are now secured and protected, much as they were in January 1904, before the West attacked Russia indirectly (through Japan, which later wanted to destroy Korea, China and Mongolia), and then in January 1914, before the West attacked Russia directly. South Asia, India, is already with Russia and we will soon see the consolidation of the Eurasian heartland, as Central Asia joins this defensive Alliance of Eurasia.

As for the Russian-sponsored BRICS Economic Alliance, even now 45% of the world population, it was founded in 2009 in Ekaterinburg, the City of the Martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and his Family, a martyrdom ordered from New York. BRICS, now with nine countries, includes other countries from Asia (the UAE), Africa (Ethiopia and South Africa) and Latin America (Brazil). In Kazan, in seven weeks’ time, new members will ask to join the BRICS Alliance, some say thirty countries, some say more, though most of them may not actually be joining as early as this year. Among the candidates are countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Cuba, Bolivia, Gabon, Venezuela, Belarus, Turkiye, Algeria, Indonesia, Vietnam, Serbia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and even, one day, for the moment EU Hungary, Slovakia and Italy.

Russian victory was imminent at the end of 1916, liberating Vienna in summer 1917 and Berlin in autumn 1917, just before the Western prevented that victory by overthrowing the Tsar with its agents and replacing him with the Western agents, Lenin and Trotsky, the former of whom created the Ukraine, the second of whom was born in what is now the Ukraine. Russia is back. This Russian victory may be imminent again, in 2024 – unless the West can overthrow the present Tsar. Over a century of thwarted Russian victory may be over at last, despite the spies, traitors, perverts and schismatics who have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian-United Eurasia and European Collapse

Three of the four world’s superpowers and largest economies are in Asia: China, India and Russia.  China and India were once far more prosperous and far more advanced than Europe, before Western Europeans colonised, exploited and destroyed them. That process has now gone into reverse: Asia now dominates Western Europe. Moreover, Eurasian Russia is getting Asia to unite. East Asia (China etc), West Asia (the old ‘Middle East’), South Asia (India etc) and North Asia (Russia) are uniting. Apart from the still hesitant five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, what is missing is US-occupied North-West Asia (what is still called ‘Western Europe’, 5% of the world population) and US-occupied North-East Asia (the ever-shrinking Japan and South Korea).

The hope is that both the latter, the North-West Asian Peninsula (the Western half of Europe, which has so disastrously tried to expand into the Eastern half, in the Ukraine) and the North-East Asian Archipelago (Japan and South Korea), will liberate themselves from Americanisation (camouflaged beneath the word ‘Globalism’) and enter into this Grand Alliance of the Global Majority of BRICS. For this to happen patriotic left and patriotic right have to unite against the anti-patriotic, NATO-Nazi Globalists of the US-created Uniparty, who are the real extremists. Liberation from the 20% of the pro-US, pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-Kiev and pro-Woke Globalist Establishment is what the 80%, the peoples of Western Europe, seek. For the Globalists always put anti-national interests first, to the detriment of their own electorates.

Such liberation from the Establishment, the System, as it is called in Germany (‘the Deep State’ in the USA), is now the electoral path in the UK, France, Germany and almost every other country in Western Europe, against the highly unpopular ruling class elite. We the people want our sovereignty and our national identity, which we believe is in our saints, back. In the meantime, we have to face the contemporary Western reality. This is summed up by both the opening and closing ceremonies of the Pagan Games in Paris, which show exactly what its nature is. The Serbian Orthodox tennis player Novak Djokovich and some African athletes resisted the persecution and blasphemies against Christianity there, but few others did.

LGBT ideology and transgenderism dominate the Western Establishment (for example, the millionaire pedophiles employed by the BBC) more and more. It is shocking. The West has become the collapsing Soviet Union. It is 1989 in the West. As a result, President Putin has issued an executive order to take in spiritual refugees from the West, on condition that they share in the traditional religious values of the Russian Federation and that they are under persecution. Should people move there?

Moving to Russia

So far only one Russian family from our parish has moved to Russia, though not because they were under persecution. That was eighteen months ago.  It was a great success financially. They both have jobs which they like and they are already able to buy their own home. One other parishioner is thinking about following their example, but most of my many Russian parishioners are not even contemplating it. Let alone our Ukrainians, Balts, Romanians, Moldovans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and the other twenty-one nationalities among our 600 regular parishioners.

Here some should take care, not returning Russians who know the situation perfectly well, but naïve and idealistic Non-Russian converts to Orthodoxy. They should ask themselves many questions first: Why do most Russians stay here and new Russians even want to come here? Why do they not return and others still want to leave Russia? The fact is that in today’s Russia, most live in high-rise tower blocks, abortion is twice even the appalling level of Western countries, divorce is just as high as in the West, and most baptised Orthodox are still cremated when they die. Beware of ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ syndrome.

Then there is the bureaucracy (just as bad as in France) and corruption, which is especially noticeable when it comes to health care with its universal envelopes under the table. As for the Church, only 2-3% go to church, partly because of the problems of corrupt and oligarchic homosexual bishops and money-grubbing priests (those two problems helped cause the post-1917 persecution of the Church). What many in the West do not understand is that Russia is dominated by a cultural Orthodoxy, rather than a zealous, practising Orthodoxy, just like every other country in the Orthodox world.

Then there are purely practical questions. Do you speak Russian? You will have to learn. What money will you live off, if you live in Russia? What job will you find? How will your children adapt to a very different and much tougher school system? Will you attend church in Slavonic and on the old calendar? (If you do not do so here, how will you cope there?). Just a little dose of reality.

Conclusion: Avoiding Escapism

For most it is too early to contemplate moving to Russia. Let us wait and see. As long as we can still be saved here, as long as we can still fight and resist here, despite the persecution of us here, not by LGBT fanatics, but by certain so-called ‘Orthodox’ bishops, let us stay here. To leave now seems like running away. We still have the chance to win here.

 

After the End-Game in the Ukraine

Introduction: After the Conflict

After two and a half years of conflict in the Ukraine, we have at last arrived at the end-game. There may even be less than six months to go, as the conflict could even end on about its 1,000th day, in mid-November. What will happen once the end-game is over, whether that is in 2024 or in 2025? Once the war is won, how will the peace be won? What will post-conflict Ukraine look like? What are the differences in intentions between the ‘moderates’ and the ‘hardliners’ in Moscow?

Provinces Returned to the Russian Federation?

At first, in 2014, the profoundly Russian Crimea and Sevastopol (which also counts as  a province) returned to Russia by overwhelming popular consent after sixty years of Communist-enforced separation. This was extremely popular. Then, because of Kiev’s genocidal aggression there, in February 2022 the two provinces of the Russian Donbass also returned to Russia by overwhelming popular consent. Next, because of Kiev’s threats to the Crimea, in late 2022, Russian Zaporozhie and Kherson also returned to Russia, again by overwhelming popular vote in referenda. Both the moderates and the hardliners in Moscow agree about the return of these six Russian provinces with their pre-war population of twelve million, as also about the neutrality of the Ukraine, that it will never become part of NATO.

Unlike the moderates in Moscow, however, the hardliners want Russia to take back the rest of Novorossija, another four provinces, namely, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa, though also by referenda, which are still to be held. Moreover, the fate of the three provinces of Sumy, Chernigov and Poltava, which are also on the west bank of the Dnieper, hangs in the balance as well -the hardliners want them too. If they transfer to Russia, then much of the territory conquered by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, his son, Tsar Peter the Great and Tsarina Catherine the Great some 300 years ago, will be restored to Russia. If these seven provinces returned to Russia, this would reduce the New Ukraine to fourteen provinces out of the original twenty-seven.

A Province Returned to Romania?

As a result of Kiev’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk province, continual drone attacks on and terrorist threats to civilians and installations far inside Russia, most of the remainder of the Ukraine is probably going to end up as a third Union State, independent in local affairs, but otherwise more or less under Russian control, in effect a client state similar to Belarus. However, from this remainder of the Ukraine, the very small province of Chernivtsy (North Bukovina), or most of it, may, if it chooses to do so by referendum, return to Romania, from where it was taken in 1945. This transfer could perhaps take place in exchange for Transdnestria and Gagauzia, which overwhelmingly want to leave Romanian-speaking Moldova and join Russia. However, that will depend on Moldova, not on Romania.

If the rest of Moldova then chooses to rejoin Romania by referendum, perhaps on the Russian condition that all NATO bases are closed in Romania, that will be their choice. However, we think it much more likely that Moldovans will choose to remain independent of EU Romania and so free to receive cheap Russian energy. In that case, in an independent Moldova, the Moldovan Orthodox Church must receive joint autocephaly from the Russian and the Romanian Orthodox Churches, with all so-called ‘defrocked’ clergy (defrocked for purely political and non-canonical reasons) ‘refrocked’, as is always done in the case of political defrockings. Church unity can then be achieved there.

Provinces Returned to Hungary, Slovakia and Poland?

As for Hungary, it should also take back the tiny slice of Hungarian territory on the edge of the Ukrainian border. This would be taken from the strangely-named province of Zakarpattia, which could get back its old name of Podkarpatska Rus (Subcarpathian Rus) and also possibly return to Hungary or else to Slovakia.

Then there comes the situation of the Western provinces of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, and possible the next three other far western, formerly Polish provinces of Volyn, Rovno and Ternopol. Should they be separated from the future New Ukraine and return to Poland, as the moderates recommend? True, the CIA and MI6 financed and supplied anti-Russian, Neo-Nazi terrorism in far western Ukraine from 1948 until at least 1958 and many Russian patriots died there.

For this reason, the moderates do not want to touch this territory. However, now that most of the Neo-Nazis have been killed in the conflict or have fled to the West, there would be much less opposition there to remaining in a New Ukraine, which would have a measure of independence. Surely Russia is obliged to secure its borders by controlling this territory, rather than giving it back to Poland? The danger is after all that any unliberated territory, or territory handed over to Poland, will be turned into use as a NATO terrorist base against you. So argue the hardliners, who would thus reduce the New Ukraine to seven provinces.

Conclusion: The New Ukraine

This New Ukraine or Malorossija would be left perhaps with a minimum of seven provinces and a maximum of twenty-one, counting the City of Kiev and the Kiev province separately. It would have a population of between about nine and twenty-five million, providing that all ten million or so who left to work in the West in the last ten years return, which is highly unlikely. Essentially, it will be a landlocked, southern and large Belarus. Although it will be bankrupted, it will never pay the debts of the old regime back to the West, especially to the City of London, and will be rebuilt by Russia and China. Surely, however, its canonical Church would have to receive autocephaly from Moscow and become a centre of national unity and identity, just as in the future Moldova.