War with holy places

Until now, this picture stands before my eyes - the noble-rocky shore of the Seversky Donets.

Unfortunately, still not our shore.

Bare chalk rock - as if someone had skinned the ground in this place, exposing vulnerable white flesh, only, unlike human, crumbly, starchy.

However, despite the withered porosity, these are still rocks, and the root of the "mountains" in the name of Svyatogorsk stands in its rightful place.

And above these mountains - domes, domes, domes ... Through the frontal smoke of vulnerable and defenseless, but furiously radiant beauty, the Svyatogorsk Lavra appears.

It has been my dream to get into the Svyatogorsk Lavra all these eight years.

We agreed to visit there with Motorola and Lena, his wife, back in the summer of 2014, when the militia was diligently and desperately defending Semyonovka, the main outpost of sacred Slavyansk.

Svyatogorsk was no longer ours then.

In terms of war.

While his holy places were still nourished by the Russian Orthodox Church.

However, no matter how much faith and religion rose above politics, during this monstrous war even sacred things fell hostage to human hardening and absolutely vile, almost terrorist bargaining.

Here, willy-nilly, you draw Syrian parallels - when the same ISIS* or al-Qaeda fighters** used temples and ancient monasteries for their programmatic and murderous purposes.

Here is just one illustration of the Svyatogorsk Lavra, which, alas, we did not have time to free from the hostages of the Kyiv regime.

In the summer, during active hostilities in this sector of the front, hundreds of civilians found refuge there.

The Orthodox brethren were able to provide them with shelter and some kind of shelter.

The monastery stood, as they say in such cases, literally between two fires.

I know for sure that our military received a categorical order from the Ministry of Defense not to shoot at the temple.

Regardless of whether there are Ukrainian soldiers there or not.

Yes, this factor significantly affected the promotion, but the order was carried out.

The wooden skete burned down, I don’t know exactly how it happened and I don’t want to speculate on this topic.

But I’m sure that none of ours set such a goal for themselves.

The fighting around Svyatogorsk continued for more than two hot summer months.

Ukrainian checkpoints set up by right-wing neo-Nazis*** on the other side of the river did not allow refugees to leave the Lavra.

The monastery ran out of food, the Kyiv regime did not supply food there, occasionally Orthodox humanitarian workers (and from the territories controlled by Ukraine) broke through there bypassing the barriers, but the right-wingers stopped this too.

In order to open the passage even for their own, it would seem, fellow citizens, the neo-Nazis demanded that the DPR (knowing how important the Lavra and the humanitarian situation there are for us) extradite war criminals from the Donetsk prison.

I have no right to divulge the details of all these negotiations, but the very fact that the starving people in the Lavra became the subject of bargaining for them, in my opinion, is disastrously indicative ...

That is why, no matter how bitter it is now, the current, November actions of the Ukrainian, so to speak, regime in relation to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and priests in the Rivne region do not shock or surprise me.

Neo-Nazis are at war even with shrines.

The more serious the challenge we have accepted, and the more important our mission.

The evil that we are faced with is more absolute and deeper than it might seem to many at first ...

* 

** "Al-Qaeda" - the organization was recognized as a terrorist organization by the decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of February 14, 2003.

*** Right Sector is a Ukrainian association of radical nationalist organizations, recognized as extremist and banned in Russia (decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 11/17/2014).

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.