Russian authorities target anti-war priest with new charges

Russian authorities have opened a case against a prominent anti-war priest on charges of discrediting the army.

The charges are linked to Archbishop Viktor’s recent article entitled “An answer to the question that many are worrying about: What is this war?”, according to the Archbishop’s website.

The article did not name either side in the Russian-Ukrainian war, describing it as “the war going on in the western part of our former empire”.

However, it criticised the attacks on civilians, saying it showed that the goal was not to destroy the other side’s military capacity, “but specifically people, the genetic pool of a nation that has decided to leave Satan’s camp and join those who are free from it”.

The 86-year-old priest had already been fined in March on the same charges, linked to one of his sermons.

In October the Pokrovsko-Tikhonovskaya Church where he serves and resides was raided and searched by masked, armed law-enforcement officers. The church is in the town of Slavyansk-on-Kuban, in Russia’s southern Krasnodar Region.

The officers beat up and detained another priest at the church, Hieromonk Iona. He was held in police custody for two days and questioned over his article “Cult of War”, visiting Ukrainian websites, and supporting ‘Nazism’.

The article by Hieromonk Iona accused the “Soviet Moscow patriarchy of taking the course of militarisation of the church even before the events of 2014”.

In a short film by Novaya Gazeta Europe, Archbishop Viktor said it was his life’s mission to fight Bolshevism.

“We have been made to believe that the church is outside politics. That is a cunning, devilish lie,” he said.

He also said that since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he had been openly saying that it was “an illegal seizure and occupation of a foreign country”.

“When our tanks are in a neighbouring country and our soldiers are savagely torturing people there, carrying out an invasion, they are damned. Such a war is cursed both by God and man,” he said.

Archbishop Viktor’s latest article lashed out at the Russian government for allegedly planning a nuclear catastrophe. The blowing up of Ukraine’s Kakhovka dam, which was part of the system for cooling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station’s power blocs, was part of the alleged plan, he claimed.

“It must be said the explosion of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station also took many lives and flooded almost the entire farmlands of Kherson region,” he added.

“The souls of those behind this kind of highest evil are becoming completely like that of Satan. The devil enters and possesses them. They are no longer humans, but demons in a human shell, and they can be mistakenly taken for those suffering from schizophrenia,” the article said.

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