For a broadcast about humanitarian aid, such a route is unusual. The guest does not speak of the front line but of the road travelled by people fleeing war through foreign territory. The journey begins in Mariupol. Refugees first undergo ‘filtration’ in Taganrog and Rostov Oblast, then end up in temporary accommodation centres in Leningrad Oblast, such as ‘Tsaritsyno Ozero.’ The quotation marks around ‘filtration’ are no accident: they refer to the checks people undergo along this route, and it is these checks that determine where a person will end up next.
For many, St Petersburg becomes a transit point to Europe. From there the route continues across the borders with Estonia, Finland and Latvia. Returning to Ukraine also has to be done through Europe — the same long loop, only in reverse. For families with children, the elderly and those in need of medical care, every crossing means new documents, new waiting points and new questions without answers.
The guest assesses the scale of what is happening differently from official sources. He considers the official estimate of one million refugees to be several times too high. He himself, by his own account, has seen several hundred people. The gap between the official figure and personal observation matters for the aid itself: volunteers work with specific individuals — their tickets, dates and routes — not with statistics.
How the aid is organised
Money is raised through Facebook and channelled through the church’s legal entity. According to the archbishop, donations range from fifty to one hundred thousand roubles. At that time the social network was one of the main tools for private fundraising, and a small community without wide recognition could rely on it. A legal entity is needed so that money can be accounted for and spent transparently, rather than passed from hand to hand.
Volunteers buy tickets, find accommodation along the way, take people to the border and pay for medical treatment. Among specific expenses he also mentions equipment: students were given about forty laptops. The team is mostly secular: municipal deputies, activists, environmentalists. A municipal deputy, unlike a federal one, is elected at the local level and knows the district services, schools and hospitals well, so such people often become intermediaries between aid and local authorities.
With individual officials, he says, it is possible to work. For a journey that crosses several regions and two states, this is essential: without local agreements, a ticket and a bed do not solve the problem, and the person is left at the station.
Why he speaks of Christ as a refugee
The archbishop explains his decision through the Gospel story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. The Gospel of Matthew tells how Joseph, Mary and the infant leave the country because of the threat from King Herod. Orthodox Christians are used to reading this episode as a story of salvation. In the guest’s interpretation, it becomes a direct instruction for the community: Christ himself was in the position of a person with nowhere to go, and therefore helping refugees is not an optional extra for a believer but part of the faith.
‘And Christ was a refugee.’
From this he derives a requirement for preaching itself. Words without deeds, he says, carry no weight: ‘If we preach some abstract humanism and abstract Christianity, we are not worth a penny.’ For him this is not a declaration but concrete work with people who come for help.
The Apostolic Orthodox Church, to which the archbishop belongs, is a small jurisdiction not part of most local Orthodox churches. This status means that its clergy operate outside the structures familiar to most parishes, and this is largely why it can build relationships with volunteers and secular partners directly.
The programme ‘The Humanitarian Corridor,’ in which the interview aired, is devoted to precisely such stories: people who act on the boundary between state decisions and everyday aid. The episode with the archbishop was one of those that dealt not with politics but with the road people travel and with those who help them along the way. The volunteers, according to the guest, continue to do what they did before: buy tickets, find accommodation and give equipment to students, and from one fundraising drive to the next they add to the list of those they have helped.
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