Zelenskiy's Pogrom Against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

In religious terms, Ukraine is largely an Eastern Orthodox nation, just like Russia. Close to 70% of the population currently identifies as Orthodox Christian.

For over a thousand years a common Orthodox Christian religion and Church united the peoples of what are today the separate states of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus in faith and culture. Since the 14th century the nominal ecclesiastic Patriarch of that common Orthodox faith was located in Moscow. For most of that time the peoples were united politically as well.

But as that political unity was dissolved with the Soviet Union in 1991, schisms started to creep into the common faith as well. But the divisions were not canonical or doctrinal – just church politics and competing conceptions of Ukrainian national identity. These divisions however only reached a crescendo and crisis point following the openly US-backed Maidan Putsch in Ukraine in 2014.

The ruling elites of the collective West have long regarded the Orthodox faith and particularly the Russian Orthodox Church as a threat to their domination of eastern Europe all the way back from schism in the 11th century to today.

And endless sea of Western “expert” articles and media reports rant on about the threat of the Church and how the Russian government “weaponizes” it as instrument of soft power, much as Hollywood serves as a weaponized instrument of US soft power.

However there has always been a general understanding that due to the basic right to “freedom of religion” that this soft power is not something that should be politically challenged or restricted.
I mean how often do you hear in the media about the state of Israel weaponizing the “Jewish faith” or Saudi Arabia weaponizing Sunni Islam?

But whether it is “freedom of the press”,” freedom of speech, or “Freedom of religion” is there any single thing that has made the West cast off the thin veneer of their supposed values and show their true authoritarian colors like Russia?

A decision was made following the US-backed Maidan Putsch in 2014 that in order to permanently geopolitically divide Ukraine from Russia that the cultural and religious bonds uniting the two peoples must be severed as well.
The creation of a new “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU) with a new Patriarch in Kiev was pushed by the Kiev Putsch regime and manufactured into being in 2018.

The Kiev Patriarch Filaret even gave CIA ops chief, Jack Devine, an award for his support in the creation of the new ecclesiastically- independent Ukrainian Orthodox church. Incidentally he gave an award to US neocon John McCain as well. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Since seizing power 2014 and accelerating dramatically in the last year, the US-backed Putsch regime in Kiev has been carrying out a very real pogrom against the Orthodox churches and parishioners across Ukraine who do not accept the rule and strictures of its new ly manufactured Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) , this after the older and still largest Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) officially suspended its nominal ecclesiastical ties with the Orthodox Patriarch in Moscow after the start of the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian civil conflict in February 2014.

They even made very public statements against the Russian intervention, including a procession by its priests against the Russian and Donbass siege of the NeoNazi Azov-held Azovstal Steel Plant in Mariupol.

But that isn’t good enough for the Zelenskiy regime in Kiev. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its priests, and its parishioners are still regarded with hostility and decried as “fifth columnists” that need to be cleansed from Ukraine.

 It is believed that whatever they proclaim, deep inside they do not hold absolute loyalty to the US-backed Putsch regime in Kiev and don’t truly hate Russia and Russians enough.

Zelenskiy has given an address declaring the regime’s “crackdown” on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its parishes, priests, and parishioners and drafted legislation to ban and outlaw the Ukrainian Orthodox Christian church completely,  ominously intoning “We will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul.” Because the regime apparently is now dictating even what happens in Ukrainian’s souls.

The regime’s NeoNazi and Banderite fascist battalions have been terrorizing and storming churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). Just from February to August, over 250 churches across the country were violently seized and turned over to the new Kiev-regime loyal Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The Kiev Putsch regime’s intelligence services, the SBU have also launched inquisition-like raids at monasteries and churches across the country under the guise of “counter-intelligence measures” to hunt for and root out “collaborators” and “traitors of the Ukrainian people”, searching for such damning evidence as prayer books or religious literature still in the Russian language or icons of Russian saints that prove they are acting as subversive “cells of the Russian world”

Priests have been physically dragged out of their churches, imprisoned for their heretical views, and sometimes, as in the case of Father Sergey Tarasov of Kiev,  even executed in cold-blood. Parishioners as well have been harassed, beaten, and dragged out of their churches, often in the middle of mass.

Western media and governments mostly ignore and pretend all this isn’t happening or on the rare occasions when they acknowledge the pogroms and inquisitions being carried out, speak of them in quietly approving framing and tones, all the while obscenely whitewashing the Zelenskiy regime in Kiev as some kind of paragon of “democracy”, “freedom” and liberalism”. Freedom of religion? What’s that?  Ethnic Russians and their spiritual and political sympathizers are “subhuman” and must be excised from Ukraine, you know…one way or the other…

Currently some 12,000 parishes in Ukraine, the majority, are still held by the besieged Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
The most recent polls show that despite the pressure from the regime, its Banderite battalions and ultranationalist mobs that nearly 20% of Ukrainian Orthodox believers still hold openly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and another 34% avoid declaration of their specific denomination, only willing to identify themselves as “Orthodox”.

If the Zelenskiy regime remains in power at the end of the conflict it is almost certain that the pogrom against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all those believers who refuse to convert will reach its grim and logical conclusion.