The Ukrainian Orthodox Church had broken away from the Moscow Patriarchate. Nevertheless, believers report that Russian propaganda is being preached in the Church of the Transfiguration in Odessa – despite an attack on the church.
It is hammered and drilled in the Spaso-Preobrazhenskyj Church in Odessa, in German Transfiguration Cathedral. The church can be restored, that’s the good news from Miroslaw Datowitsch.
He wears a blue hard hat and the long black cassock flaps around his legs as he leads through the cathedral’s cool, lofty main room. The Russian attack on the church was a heavy blow, the brown-haired priest said. Russia supposedly wants to liberate Ukraine, but the question is why.
UOC priest Miroslaw Datowitsch does not want to talk about the metropolitan’s pro-Russian attitudes.
Metropolitan of Odessa congratulated Putin
The Transfiguration Cathedral belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – UOK for short. It only officially broke away from the Moscow Patriarchate three months after the start of the major Russian invasion. The head of the Moscow Patriarchate, Kirill, is an ardent supporter of Russia’s war of aggression and blesses Moscow’s weapons against Ukraine. UOC Metropolitan of Odessa and Ismail Agafangel condemned the Russian attack on Odessa and the Church of the Transfiguration. But in the past he has often emerged as an enthusiastic supporter of Russia, leading some to dub him the “Red Metropolitan”.
“Our prayers have been answered” – this is how Agafangel congratulated Vladimir Putin on his re-election as Russian President in 2012. In addition, the influential UOC metropolitan sat for years in the Odessa regional parliament for the pro-Russia “Party of Regions”, whose successor party has now been banned.
The interior of the Transfiguration Cathedral is a construction site.
“I don’t answer questions like that”
Since the destruction, Datowitsch has been leading through the Church of the Transfiguration, he is a close collaborator of Agafangel. He conducted about 50 interviews, but he did not answer questions about the attitude of Metropolitan Agafangel. The church shouldn’t get involved in politics, he says. The UOC – which only broke away from the Moscow Patriarchate in May 2022 – has not been connected to Moscow for more than 30 years, he claims crossly.
If you ask what this or that person said, I cannot answer that. I’m not asking you what Angela Merkel thinks today or what she thought ten years ago, and it doesn’t interest me either.
Afanasji sees deception in donations
In front of the Transfiguration Cathedral, a banner in Ukrainian advertises donations for the reconstruction, a priest prays, some elderly women cross themselves and murmur along. According to Archbishop Afanasji of Odessa and Balta, believers are being deliberately deceived because the UOC is still the Russian Church.
He belongs to the Second Orthodox Church in Ukraine. This was founded in 2018 with state support and has nothing to do with Russia. The donations for the repair of the Transfiguration Church went directly to the propagandists of Russia, according to the head of the Odessa diocese.
“The Church of the Transfiguration is officially used by the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Its priests there preach for the Russian world and against Ukraine,” Afanasji said.
“We are the real Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the others do Russia propaganda,” says Archbishop Afanasji.
Believers are influenced
Archbishop Afanasji is sitting in a side room of the Nativity Cathedral in Odessa, where services are being held – unlike at the UOK in Ukrainian. The believers often don’t even know in which church they pray, he says. However, many would prick up their ears when it came to Russian propaganda.
Worshiper Natalja couldn’t believe her ears either. After her son Oleksyj died at the front, she sought consolation from a UOK priest and instead heard Russian propaganda. “They said that we were being pressured, that America would do all this and that we and the Russians were brothers,” she says.
He often gets calls from believers who report such incidents, says Afanasji from the still young “Orthodox Church in Ukraine”. After the Russian attack, pro-Russian UOC representatives spread the word that the Church of the Transfiguration had been hit by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses and not by a Russian missile.
More than 60 cases of espionage and collaboration
Russia’s war against Ukraine began in Donbass in 2014, and even then representatives of the “Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate” undermined democracy, Archbishop Afanasji said of his experiences in Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.
There I saw clergymen collaborating and they even picked up a gun to kill to fight against everything Ukrainian.
According to its own statements, the Ukrainian secret service has uncovered more than 60 cases of espionage for Russia and collaboration in the UOC since the start of the large-scale Russian invasion. The suspects reportedly betrayed Ukrainian military positions to Moscow or openly spread pro-Putin propaganda. In November 2022, the aggressor country Russia was also openly honored in the Kiev Cave Monastery – with a song for Russia.
The abbot of the cave monastery is also accused of collaboration and inciting religious hatred. He was released from custody on bail in mid-August.
Power struggle with the Ukrainian leadership
A bitter power struggle has been raging between the UOC and the Ukrainian leadership for months. Ukraine is one of the historic centers of Christianity, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyj recently emphasized, repeating that religious tolerance is part of Ukraine’s self-image. Referring to the UOC, which until recently belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate, he said: “The state will never allow one of the Ukrainian religious communities to be used by an aggressor state.”
Meanwhile, repairs are continuing at the Church of the Transfiguration in Odessa. As long as the UOK sets the tone there, Archbishop Afanasji has no illusions. “There has always been Russian propaganda there in the past, there is it now and there will always be.”