During a speech at the World Russian Church Council, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that interference in church life in the post-Soviet space threatens to destroy civilization values.. This reaction of the ruler to the possible provision of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church demonstrates that Putin understands perfectly well what challenges the “civilization of evil” has faced, whose interests he defends in the modern world.

The Russian church was the guardian of the traditions of this civilization over the centuries - and then when its hierarchs actually headed the process of formalizing the new state in the early Romanov era, and when the church, together with the state, engaged in the physical destruction of church “old dissidents”, and when the church of the synodal period part of the state machine, and when the church of the times of the patriarch Sergius agreed to serve Stalin, and when the church of the times of the patriarch Kirill agreed to serve Putin. The unscrupulous use of the church to implant the empire was also in foreign territories - primarily in the territory of Ukraine, after the actual seizure by Moscow officials in cassocks of the Kiev metropolitan.

Now it all ends. After the decision of the Synod of the Constantinople Patriarchate in Ukraine, only his own metropolis remained - well, a group of dissenters from the Russian Orthodox Church, which, contrary to canons and common sense, is trying to protect the interests of Putin and Cyril in Ukraine.

But it is already clear that this group is doomed, that between the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian flock there is a deep civilization split, a split between ours and others in the Ukrainian land..

Putin can not ignore this. He says that “civilizational values ??and cultural and historical spaces that have evolved over the centuries” are being destroyed.. And he is absolutely right.. For centuries, Moscow’s mockery of Ukraine — including with the indiscriminate use of faith and the church — has come to nothing.

Putin’s irritation shows that Ukraine and its church are on the right track.

Original.