RUSSIAN authorities continue to prosecute clergy who speak out against the war in Ukraine, despite recent progress on ceasefires.
Religious representatives opposing the war are being swept up by a legal system designed to crush dissent under the charge of “discrediting” the armed forces.
Archbishop Grigory Mikhnov-Vaytenko, an Orthodox leader of the Russian Apostolic Orthodox Church, was originally arrested last year on his way to conduct a memorial service for Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Labelled a “foreign agent”, he has now been found guilty of “discrediting” the Russian armed forces.
The latest case against him was based on a video he posted in March 2022, when the full-scale Russian invasion began, and which he opposed on religious grounds.
Archbishop Grigory was fined 30,000 roubles (about £270) by the St Petersburg local district court, but has said that he expects another case to be brought against him, as “without a second charge there is no criminal case”, Forum 18, a Norwegian news service, reported.
Moscow has revised and broadened the legal grounds for punishment and prosecution of those who object to the war in Ukraine. This also encompasses dissent based on religious beliefs.
“The government has used a range of tactics to pressure religious leaders into supporting the renewed invasion of Ukraine,” Forum 18 said. These include “warnings to senior and local religious leaders, and prosecuting and fining religious believers and clergy who have publicly opposed the war”.
The St Petersburg court stated that Archbishop Grigory described the invasion of Ukraine as “unmotivated, aggressive, armed actions . . . against a neighbouring state” in the video on his Telegram channel. He also termed the Russian Federation attacks “striking at [public] squares” as an attempt to destroy “the resistance that the courageous Ukrainian people are putting up”, and likened them to the Gadarene swine story, urging people not to follow a demonic path to destruction, and saying that Russians will suffer the “most severe defeat in history”.
The judge assigned to the case, Anna Volgina, said that dissenting statements can have a “negative impact . . . [and] reduce the decisiveness and effectiveness of the implementation of assigned tasks by the Armed Forces . . . even without directly pursuing this very goal”.
The Archbishop defended his actions in court by claiming that it had not been his intention to discredit the armed forces, referring to relevant statutes from the Russian Orthodox Church and highlighting that, as in church doctrine, there is no acceptable reason for murder.
To date, two more people have been imprisoned, and three fined, for opposing the war on religious grounds. Other individuals were added to Russia’s Federal Wanted List once they had left the country.