Filaret is dead – Zoria is going after Kyiv Patriarchate
After Filaret’s death, OCU spokesman Yevstratiy Zoria has resumed his media assault on his rivals from the Kyiv Patriarchate. Let’s look at his main claims.
1️⃣Zoria insists that the UOC-KP is a Kremlin project designed to undermine the OCU. According to him, the new “patriarch,” Nikodym Kobzar, created “a structure that mimics belonging to a milieu hostile to the Kremlin, but in reality acts solely to destroy the Kremlin’s true opponents.”
Let us recall that the Kyiv Patriarchate was revived in 2019 not by Kobzar at all, but by Filaret. Moscow had nothing to do with it. Poroshenko and Epifaniy promised Filaret the primacy in the OCU – and then double-crossed him. That was why Filaret decided to resurrect his own structure. For years afterward, Zoria portrayed Filaret as a senile old man who had lost his bearings. But he still stopped short of accusing him of working for the FSB. The current “patriarch,” apparently, is fair game.
2️⃣ Zoria declared UOC-KP “hierarch” Ioasaf Shibaev to be the “original source and godfather of this circus sideshow.” Why? Because Shibaev is a Russian citizen, lives in Russia, and still has not been arrested.
“Dear readers! Are you really capable of believing that Russian citizen Shibaev, who in Belgorod – right now – freely heads a structure bearing the name of a Ukrainian one, is not under FSB patronage?” Zoria writes.
We would like to remind our readers that there are several people with Russian citizenship in the OCU structure as well – among them Klyment Kushch, Adrian Staryna, and Vsevolod Matviyevsky. The first two were living and serving in Russia until quite recently. By Zoria’s own logic, are they also under FSB patronage? And if not, what exactly makes them different from Shibaev? Or are they, too, working for the Kremlin?
3️⃣ According to Zoria, the new “patriarch” of the UOC-KP is an FSB agent because he is “a former MP priest from the inner circle of Ionafan Yeletskykh when the latter ruled in Sumy.” Apparently, Zoria considers Sumy itself a suspect region, since he hastens to remind readers that former MP and traitor Derkach also comes from the Sumy area. “Isn’t that concentration of chekists and their friends around the Sumy clown Kobzar enough to understand what this is all about, dear readers?” Zoria asks.
Our answer is no – it is not enough. And frankly, his logic is impossible to follow. Why is it that the few “former MP priests” who defect to the OCU immediately become “wise pastors” and patriots, while “former MP priest” Kobzar is branded an FSB agent? What, exactly, is the difference?
4️⃣ As for the rest of Zoria’s “arguments,” they are little more than a jumble of words in the genre of pure stream-of-consciousness ranting. Apparently, the urgent task today is to crush a rival – and coming up with anything serious is simply too much effort.
Still, the OCU spokesman does arrive at one clear concluding point. He calls for the entire UOC-KP to be shipped off to Russia to join its “chekist friends.” Behind this, one can unmistakably hear the immortal slogan of patriotic intellectuals whenever they deal with anyone they dislike: “Suitcase – railway station – Russia!”
