Ukraine, Russia, and Syria: How They Relate to the Orthodox Church
Caesar fiddled on his violin while Rome burned. Now the political and religious leaders in Ukraine, Russia, and Syria are playing a deadly game of chess while millions of Ukrainian lose everything: their homes and possesions, their physical and mental health, or their very lives. Also, hundreds of millions of malnourished adults and children in poorer countries may be starving to death due to these political-military games.
According to The Wall Street Journal, in order to firm up its political-military alliance with Syria, Russia is stealing grain from Ukrainian storage facilities in territories Russia controls, using its soldiers to drive truckloads of grain to ports on the Black Sea, and shipping this grain – over 400,000 tons of it – to ports in Syria.
The Wall Street Journal's documentary "Video Investigation: Russia Is Using a Secret Network to Steal Ukraine Grain" offers detailed evidence of just how these trucks and ships were tracked from those Ukrainian grainaries to the ports and then to Syria.
This is how Russia intends to profit from conquering Ukraine. Most often, war is not really about ideological or religious issues, it is about profiting from the material wealth garnered from the defeated country and its international trade. Religion or ideology is merely being used as a smokescreen: the Pope has admonished Patriarch Kirill against being "an altar boy for Putin."
While living in Moscow for 11 years, we frequently picked up the latest issues of The Moscow Times newspaper. At the start of this war, the newspaper's staff fled to various countries and has assembled a virtual network of reporters to publish The Moscow Times online that I receive each week. Their piece "Investigations Uncover Russia's Alleged Ukrainian Grain Smuggling" adds some details to the above story:
"Satellite images and GPS data indicate that Russia could be exporting grain smuggled out of occupied Ukrainian territory, investigations by the BBC and the Financial Times have revealed. Russia has been accused by Western powers of using food as a weapon in its war with Ukraine by targeting the country's grain storage facilities and blockading its Black Sea exports.
"The Financial Times said its analysis of satellite photographs and port records indicated that Russia had exported huge amounts of grain in eight shipments from annexed Crimea to Syria and Turkey in May. The figures mark an unseasonal increase in the volume of grain exports at the sanctioned Crimean port compared with previous years.
The publication also tracked activity consistent with the smuggling of looted goods, such as vessels switching off their transponders in violation of international law, using ship-to-ship transfers at sea and forging paperwork to obscure the origins of its cargo." "Alleged" is too soft a word: the evidence is rather damning.
Dmitri Trenin, director-in-exile of the Carnegie Moscow Center, writes in his article "Russia's Interests in Syria" that "because Russian foreign policy is currently acquiring an ideological dimension, with the Russian Orthodox Church becoming a key political ally and partner of the Kremlin, the protection [my emphasis] of the dwindling Christian community in Syria, and more broadly in the Middle East, is ostensibly beginning to feature as a new geopolitical interest, at least rhetorically."
How does Patriarch John of the Greek Orthodox of Antioch pay for this "protection"? – by switching from supporting its traditional ally, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, as the Greek Orthodox Church does, to supporting Russia's Patriarch Kirill, who would like to make himself the Ecumenical Patriarch, denies that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople had the authority to grant autocephaly to the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and has gone into schism against the true Ecumenical Patriarch. Grain stolen by Russia from Ukraine is now feeding members of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch in Syria. In turn, with Russian assistance Assad's army protects that Church in Syria.
According to the article "Widespread Orthodox Church Backlash Unleashed Against Russia's Aggression in Ukraine," the three-way political chess game that is the war in Ukraine "is one of high stakes for the Russian Orthodox patriarch... as a bad outcome could imperil the dominant sway he [Patriarch Kirill] holds within Orthodox Christianity because his Church is much larger numerically than any other national Orthodox Church. By losing Ukraine, Russia would lose a very substantial part of its own Church; if it lost Ukraine, it would become much less than half of what it is now, and with this it would also lose universal primacy in Orthodoxy." Due to his "third Rome" mindset, the Moscow Patriarch considers that he already possesses "universal primacy" and does not want to lose it by losing Ukraine. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of soldiers on each side are being maimed or killed and millions of civilians have been forced to become refugees in other lands.
Holding the Antiochian Church hostage for "protection" is the same sort of tactic as blackmailing Western Europe by threatening those countries with an oil and gas embargo. In "Ukrainian World Congress to sue Canada for returning Nord Stream 1 turbine," we read that Paul Grod, Ukrainian World Congress President and CEO in Canada, says – "We cannot supply a terrorist state with the tools it needs to finance the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people. This is not just about a turbine or possible many turbines to support Russia's energy exports, this is about continuously succumbing to Russia's blackmail." [my emphasis] I wonder whether the consciences of any Antiochian Orthodox Christians besides mine is troubled about participating in this theft, protection racket, and blackmailing?
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