Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Kurt Volker
Over week until Oct. 17, seven Ukrainian soldiers were killed in fighting in Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas. More than 10,300 people have died since the Kremlin started its military intervention in eastern Ukraine in April 2014 – the largest number killed by war in Europe since the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s, and at least 1.5 million people have been displaced from their homes by the fighting – the largest number in any conflict in Europe since World War II.
But as the war rages on into its fifth year, you wouldn’t know it from the front pages of the international media, where Ukraine hardly now gets a mention. While the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe now regularly spots Russian military convoys secretly entering and leaving Ukraine, the occurrences are now so frequent not to merit reporting, it seems.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Oct. 12 reported that one of its Unmanned Aerial Vehicles had spotted another convoy moving under the cover of darkness into Ukraine, with one of the trucks carry an anti-aircraft gun. The brazenness of the Kremlin’s actions is in inverse proportion to the amount of negative media coverage it gets.
That’s why it is of vital importance that people like Kurt Volker, the special envoy of the United States to Ukraine, continue to tell the world about the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Kremlin is counting on “Ukraine fatigue” sapping media coverage of its war of aggression on Ukraine. As the attention of the world drops away, Moscow can quietly escalate its activities.
The problem isn’t just the lack of coverage, of course, but the lack of a firm reaction from the governments of the world to the outrages visited on Ukraine by the Kremlin. In August 2014, the Kremlin sent a huge convoy of trucks, which it described as an “aid convoy” but which was obviously a test run of a military supply asset, illegally into Ukraine.
There was no sharp reaction from the West to this brazen breach of Ukraine’s sovereignty, other than a few words of condemnation, and now these convoys have become routine – the OSCE just recorded the 79th one entering the country.
These convoys are illegal, are never properly checked by the Ukrainian authorities or international observers, because Russia refuses to allow this. They could be carrying anything in or out of Ukraine – nobody knows. Few people outside Ukraine, it appears, even care.
Volker does, and for that reason he is Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise. Speaking to the Catholic news website Crux in an interview published on Oct. 17, Volker underlined that it is the Kremlin, not Ukraine that is holding up the restoration of peace in the Donbas.
“(The Russians) want to see the people’s republics they set up there remain in place, and they want the Ukrainians and the international community to negotiate with them, which would have the effect of making this conflict permanent,” Volker said.
Volker is also quite clear that the war in Ukraine is not a “civil war” but an international conflict in which Russia is the aggressor.
“The Russians deny that they are there, which is inaccurate,” Volker told Crux. “They have regular military forces in eastern Ukraine, they have total command and control of the military forces that are there.”
Those are things this newspaper has told its readers, quite correctly, for the entirety of Russia’s war against Ukraine in the Donbas. Yet some international media, when referring to the Russian-led forces in the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, still use words like “rebels” and “separatist republics.”
They are nothing of the kind – they are Russian-led forces and fake republics set up by the Kremlin to cover for its military intervention in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine was started by Russia, and continues to this day because the Kremlin wants it to.
Volker repeats that truthful assessment every time he is interviewed. If only the international media spent more time listening to him, rather than lazily repeating the lies of Kremlin officials, the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers would not routinely go unnoticed and unreported in the world’s media.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Patriarch Kirill
Patriarch of Moscow Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, engaged in some ecclesiastical foot-stamping in Oct. 15 when it was announced that his church was breaking communion with the church in Constantinople, headed by Patriarch Bartholomew I, who is technically Kirill’s superior in the Orthodox hierarchy.
Some Western media gravely reported the event as the greatest schism in Christianity in 1,000 years, but that is a huge exaggeration (see the Reformation). It’s probably not even the greatest schism in Russian Orthodoxy, (see the Raskol of the mid 17th century, a row over the reform of church practices which split the Russian Orthodox Church into the official church and the Old Believers movement.)
Moreover, it’s only been 22 years since the last time the Moscow Patriarchate severed ties with Constantinople, which is not a long time in church history. In 1996, Moscow broke with Constantinople after the Mother Church said it was taking charge of the Orthodox Church in Estonia. Doing so, it said it was reactivating an agreement reached with the Moscow Patriarchate in 1923, when the Russian church was under severe oppression in the Soviet Union, and Estonia was an independent state. Since, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Estonia had regained its independence, Constantinople reckoned the Estonian Orthodox Church should regain its former status from before the Soviet occupation, which started in 1940.
That dispute was resolved within three months, with the Moscow Patriarchate agreeing that believers in Estonia should be allowed to choose whether to remain under the Moscow church, or switch to being governed from Constantinople.
So the Moscow Patriarchate’s dire warning of “catastrophe” should the Ukrainian Orthodox Church be recognized as independent by Constantinople should be taken with a pillar of salt. Nevertheless, the issue is a serious one, and the root of this evil is, of course, the love of money.
The Moscow Patriarchate owns some pricey real estate in Ukraine, in particular the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra church and monastery complex in the Ukrainian capital. It claims to represent up to 70 percent of Orthodox believers in Ukraine, though the real figure may be closer to 23 percent, according to polling by the Razumkov center from 2016. (The rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate has about 38 percent of Orthodox believers in its fold, with the remaining 40-or-so percent belonging to smaller denominations, or not expressing a particular affiliation.)
However, the Moscow Patriarchate has many more churches and clergymen (about 9,600) than the Kyiv Patriarchate (about 3,000 clergymen). Should large numbers of Moscow Patriarchate believers choose to switch to the Kyiv Patriarchate, the Moscow church will lose control of lots of valuable church property as well as souls – and their tithes.
The Moscow church, with its support for the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and its military intervention in Ukraine, has already lost many hearts and minds here. Around 60 parishes have switched allegiance from Moscow to Kyiv since Russia launched its war on Ukraine in early 2014, and many more could follow once the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate gains full recognition of its independence from Constantinople.
That would be a heavy blow to the rich and powerful Russian Orthodox Church, the head of which, Patriarch Kirill, has been seen wearing a $30,000 watch. While there are parallels with the situation in Estonia, the stakes in Ukraine are much higher, and consequently the howls of protest from Moscow are much louder.
But Kirill, who is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin for his ecclesiastical imperialism, shouldn’t blame Constantinople or Kyiv for the possible loss of part of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The true culprit is Putin, whose rule Kirill has described as “a miracle of God.” It’s more like “the Devil’s work.”
It was Putin’s attack on Ukraine that acted as the catalyst for recognition of Ukraine’s own Orthodox church. Constantinople had been in no hurry to grant autocephaly, or independence, to the Kyiv Patriarchate since it broke away from Moscow in 1992. The church would have probably carried on in limbo without recognition from Constantinople for many years to come had Putin’s actions not brought the matter to a head.
Putin, having lost Ukrainians’ hearts and minds, is losing their souls as well, and the baleful influence of the Kremlin and its church allies on Ukraine is at last quickly diminishing. A miracle indeed!
