PROTESTANTS in Ukraine have denounced new Russian claims to be “de-satanising” their country, as Moscow’s forces continued their assault on power and water supplies in an attempt to demoralise the population before winter.
“Having exhausted pseudo-arguments about ‘denazifying’ and ‘demilitarising’ Ukraine, the Russian propaganda media are spreading a new invasion aim of ‘de-satanisation’,” the All-Ukrainian Council, which includes Evangelical and Baptist Christians, said in a statement.
“We call for an end to these hypocritical and absurd accusations, and urge the entire civilised world to rally to Ukraine as an outpost of democratic values and freedoms.”
The statement was published in reaction to claims by Russia’s Security Council, carried in late October by the TASS news agency, that Moscow was now focusing operations on Ukraine’s “complete de-satanisation”.
Russian troops were reported this week to be reinforcing defences around Kherson and Mariupol in a bid to slow Ukraine’s counter-offensive, as Kyiv government officials confirmed that negotiations would be held only when Russian forces were withdrawn.
Speaking on Tuesday after talks with military-intelligence directors, the Primate of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), urged citizens to “devote their strength and abilities to defeating the Russian invaders”.
The Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said that Moscow was spending “tens or hundreds of million of dollars” daily on arms for its attacks, but warned that Ukrainians had not lost the “energy needed for defending the homeland”.
Dedicating a new church on Sunday for Russia’s National Guard at Balashikha, however, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow again insisted that Russia faced “dangers to its very existence”, and needed saving from a “diabolical drive” by outside forces “to push fraternal peoples into internecine strife”.
On a flight back from Bahrain on Sunday, the Pope said that Vatican officials had had held “many confidential meetings” in a search for solutions to the Ukrainian conflict, and that he believed that the cruelty inflicted on Ukrainian civilians was the work of mercenaries, not Russians, whom he held in “high esteem” as a “great people”.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Vatican ambassador, Aleksandr Avdeyev, told the Italian news agency Askanews that the Pope had helped to facilitate prisoner exchanges, most recently on 3 November, and that the Holy See remained ready to act as a mediator.
After talks in Rome with the Pope, however, Archbishop Shevchuk told journalists that he had warned the Pope that any Russian peace offers would be “colonial appeasement proposals”, which denied “the existence of the Ukrainian people, their history, culture, and even Church”.
In a separate development, the governing Synod of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church has said that Orthodox Ukrainians are now free to celebrate Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar, on 25 December, “where there are pastoral circumstances and an evident desire by the faithful”, rather than on 7 January according to the Julian calendar.
On Sunday, the Mayor of Kyiv, Vitalij Klitschko, said that large Christmas and New Year celebrations would be avoided, but confirmed that there were no plans to cancel the customary installation of a giant Christmas tree in the capital’s central square.
