CHURCH leaders in Ukraine have marked International Children’s Day with fresh appeals against Russian attacks.
The Primate of the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), said: “All our children are now, one way or another, innocent victims of Russian military aggression — this Children’s Day isn’t about gifts and sweets, but survival and rescue.
“Ukrainian children have seen what children should not see, growing up on mere fragments of childhood. How many have died prematurely from enemy bombs, drones, bullets, and mines; how many been left crippled, abused, stolen, separated from their parents, forcibly displaced, and held in hostile lands.”
In two Facebook messages, Metropolitan Epiphany said that countless children now “lived at constant risk” of “explosions and gunfire”, unable to sleep, study, and develop. He hoped that “devil servants from the Kremlin” would answer to God and receive “full and just punishment” for all lives taken.
The Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said that 550 Ukrainian children had been officially listed as dead, with 1400 injured, 2000 missing, and 20,000 abducted from occupied territories; thousands more, he said, could face deportation to Russia this year.
A 12-year-old Greek Catholic parishioner from St Nicholas’s Cathedral, in the northern city of Kharkiv, Marichka Myronenko, had been among 19 killed, with her mother, in the Russian missile attack in late May on a shopping centre in the city, Archbishop Shevchuk said.
He continued: “Today, this girl is probably helping the needy of heroic Kharkiv as a volunteer in heaven. Ukraine’s children are being kidnapped, killed, injured and deprived of their future. Their only hope is for a free and independent Ukrainian state, which fights for the future of its children, protecting and enveloping them with its love.”
The appeals were delivered as Ukrainian forces used US-supplied high-mobility artillery rocket systems to strike offensive targets inside Russia for the first time, sparking angry counter-threats from Moscow.
The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, warned at a meeting in Milan that the use of NATO-supplied weapons against Russian territory risked an “uncontrollable escalation” of the 28-month war.
This was denied, however, by Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, one of several countries approving the move, as well as by the RC Bishop of Essen, Dr Franz-Josef Overbeck, who told a church congress that the defensive use of German weapons was justified against “an adversary similar to Hitler”.
Addressing church and government officials last weekend at Ryazan, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow said that Russia was offering an “alternative to modern civilisation” economically and militarily, as well as “in the spiritual and moral sense”. Many countries were now turning to Moscow as “the authority of our Fatherland increases”, he said.
He also praised President Putin for ensuring the development of Russia’s economy and “defence capabilities”, and compared Western encroachments on historic Russian territory to the Nazi invasion in 1940.
“We won then, owing to strength of spirit, cohesion, and the incredibly high level of patriotism among our people. This is how it should be now, when so many have taken up arms against us,” the Patriarch said in a speech published on the Patriarchate’s website.
“We are showing the world other vectors of development for society and state. We grow in faith as they reject faith, normalise sin and allow all sorts of shameful outrages condemned in the Bible.”
In a sign of growing pressure, however, the Moscow-linked Orthodox Church in Estonia confirmed on Monday that it was reassessing its ties with Russian Orthodox leaders, four months after its Primate, Metropolitan Eugene (Reshetnikov), was ordered to leave for endangering national security (News, 8 March).
The Moscow Patriarchate said that it had cut ties with five Bulgarian Orthodox bishops who took part in a mid-May liturgy in Istanbul with members of Metropolitan Epiphany’s independent Ukrainian Church.
Visiting the 16th-century Pochayiv Lavra monastic complex on Monday, the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, Metropolitan Tikhon (Mollard), said that the Ukrainian state had “a right and duty to defend itself against the unjustified aggression of the Russian Federation”, but also called on the country’s authorities to “respect religious freedom, due legal process, and norms of international law”.
On Tuesday, the intelligence service in Kyiv, the SBU, said that it had blocked the distribution of “anti-Ukrainian literature” at shops belonging to the country’s Moscow-linked Orthodox Church.